


A World Alone

by Jillypups



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst I guess, Brojen, F/M, Gendrya - Freeform, I'm baaaaack, Modern AU, NOBODY BURNS, PTSD, RICKEEN FOREVER OKAY, Racey, Rickeen, Shippy ships, Shireen and Davos are BFFs/grandpa granddaughter types, Slow Burn, all the burns?, as I am wont to do, goddammit stannis, oh i almost forgot, sansan, semi burn?, some loooove, some violence, who rescues whom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-10
Updated: 2015-10-21
Packaged: 2018-04-03 17:49:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 21
Words: 131,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4109653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/pseuds/Jillypups
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompted by Willowfaerie82, who answered me in my time of need when only writing Rickeen could soothe my woes.</p><p>Shireen Baratheon has just suffered the loss of her father Stannis from a heart attack, and now must suffer through the reading of his will with her stepmother Mel. Much to the latter woman's shock, however, her father recently found out about her extramarital affair and had her cut out of the will. Mel's reaction is strong enough and terrifying enough that Shireen finds she has need for extra security measures. Luckily her cousin Gendry knows of someone.</p><p>Rickon Stark received his honorable discharge from the army three months ago, but it's done little to make the nightmares fade, to ease his anxiety and his sleeplessness. He was only gone nine months but as the only family member to not work for Stark Security, his absence was felt all the more. Now he's back, but only a shadow of his former self. When Ned Stark gets a desperate call from a well-off young woman who fears for her life, he agrees to put out all the stops. The only reason he'd ever ask his haunted youngest son for help is because his eldest has been seriously injured.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [WillowFaerie82](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WillowFaerie82/gifts).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/121155311283/a-world-alone-chapter-1-prompted-by-willowfae82)   
>  [Tucson visuals!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122722006163/a-world-alone-tucson-feels)   
>  [Rickon](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122727529493/a-world-alone-rickon-stark-feels)   
>  [Shireen](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122731332653/a-world-alone-shireen-feels=)

Shireen stands off to the side underneath the shade of a towering eucalyptus tree, sunglasses on though it is blessedly overcast today, and listens to her stepmother deliver a eulogy that has several onlookers teary-eyed. The shades hide her puffy eyes as well as they hide her expressions, none of which are suitable for her father’s funeral, but it’s impossible, listening to this shit when she knows the truth. Mel clasps her hands in reverential sorrow, eyebrows knitted together as she talks of loyalty and love, talks of the large hole in her heart left by Stannis’s death. Davos is beside Shireen and he bows his head at the mention of his closest friend’s name, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, and while she knows the two of them are likely the only ones who  _truly_  feel her father’s absence, she can tell he’s about as moved by Mel’s speech as Shireen is.

“Regardless of what took him from all of us his heart was strong, and it beat steady and true. I know this, close as we were, and I, oh,” Mel says, strong voice a warble as she peters out, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief. Her mascara does not run because no tears fall. “How I  _loved_  him.”

Davos lets loose a snort that makes Shireen have to turn around to hide a sudden bubble of laughter that threatens to escape. There are a few glances in her direction, namely from uncle Robert’s bitchy wife Cersei, but she masters herself quickly enough, unfolds her arms from across her chest to tuck a hand in the crook of Davos’s elbow. He squeezes her hand with the flexing of his bicep, and not for the first time she is grateful for his presence, for the luck that brought her father’s personal attorney into her life, as much family to her as her estranged mother. Far more so than her stepmother,  _and my father as well, now that he’s gone._

The funeral stretches on and Shireen says her piece, that he will be missed and forever loved, and then it’s a long, winding recession of cars back to the Catalina foothills capping the north of the city. They are a rumpled skirt of saguaros and rocks where her father’s house nestles against the backdrop of mountains, and the slow drive makes a long ride even longer. Safe and hidden in Davos’s Lincoln sedan, Shireen is able to relax, forehead pressed against the passenger side window as central Tucson passes her by at a snail’s pace.

“Loved him, my ass,” mutters Davos later over drinks and canapés as they stand around her father’s living room, and the late afternoon sun glints off his watch as he takes a drink of his scotch. “Unless by love she means sleeping around with other men, then yes, of course,” he says, and she’d laugh at the dig if it weren’t so horribly true.

 Luckily her father was not a man who was willing to wear a cuckold’s horns; he was in the process of lining up a divorce lawyer when the heart attack took him. Went down fighting, the way he lived his entire life. It is wonderful and horrible in one fell swoop, standing in her father’s house when he is no longer with them, when it’s Mel gliding around with a glass of wine, letting her fingers drift across people’s shoulders as she passes them by. Shireen suppresses a shudder when her stepmother pauses at her side. Shireen sips her Pimm’s and finishes off the tapenade-topped toast point in her hand.

“Shireen, dear, so good of you to come,” she says, as if Shireen would miss her father’s funeral, as if she hasn’t dropped everything in her life since she got the news.

She is 27 years old but struggles now not to roll her eyes like a surly teenager, and instead she just smiles, small and taut and sad, nodding as Mel heaves a sigh and latches on a smile as if it’s the bravest thing she could do. Davos only receives a curt nod before Stannis’s wife shakes her long hair out of her eyes and greets a fresh wave of mourners standing in the foyer. They give Shireen a wide berth as all the others do, and in her mind’s eye they are all reduced to lingering glances at the ugly affliction on her face, reduced to  _Is that stuff contagious you think_ and  _I was going to hug her but I was afraid to touch it._  She drains her drink.

“I wish Gendry could be here,” she murmurs to Davvos, frowning as her nasty older cousin Joffrey sits on the sofa staring at his phone, utterly unfazed by the fact that his uncle has died. He used to make fun of her when they were children, so she supposes this silent treatment is preferable. “He’d make this all so much more bearable.”

“No way Cersei would have let it happen,” he says, and that irritates her.

“It’s not  _her_  funeral. Or you know, the one she planned. Who cares if she’s uncomfortable? I should be able to invite who I want, he’s  _my_  dad, so if I want my other cousin to mourn with me I should be able to get that,” she says with a snap, sounding like the surly teenager now.

“If you bring him here then you know what’s going to happen. She’s going to get herself good and drunk and start throwing things at Robert for an affair that happened back when they were in college. I know you love Gendry. I like him too, but  _nobody_  wants that spectacle today,” he says, plucking a small slab of bruschetta from the tray of a passing waiter.

“That woman has made no attempt to even pretend to like the Baratheons. Even uncle Renly, and he can charm the pants off anyone,” she says of her other uncle who lives overseas, who was unable to come. “I don’t even know why she and Joffrey showed up,” she huffs.

“Open bar,” he says, and she covers her hand with her mouth, turns to gaze out the window at the city below and pretend she’s not about to laugh her ass off here at her father’s funeral reception. “So how long will you wait before giving her the boot?” Davos whispers, lightly taking the empty lowball glass from her hand as they head to the kitchen for a refill. 

As her father’s attorney he was the first to get news of Mel’s affairs, the first to know Stannis wanted her out of his will, and thusly was the first to tell Shireen that she was heiress to it all. The investment portfolios, the house, the condo in Key West, the cars, everything.

“As long as it takes to pack her slutty wardrobe and get the hell out of here,” she murmurs under her breath, smiling politely when a hired waiter comes into the kitchen to replenish the hors d’oeuvres on his tray. They linger until he leaves, Davos meticulously measuring out the ginger ale while Shireen cuts herself another slice of cucumber.

“She might be here a while then, that woman’s got a  _lot_  of tight skirts,” Davos says, and now she laughs outright, unable to help it. She licks the splash of Pimm’s from her fingers after dropping the cucumber in her drink, giggling uncontrollably after one too many cracks from her dear friend.

He grins with a shrug and sips his scotch as she leans against the counter, overcome with laughter. It feels  _good_ , like letting her hair down from a tight ponytail, but then she remembers that her father is gone, that he is dead and buried in the hard desert earth. Tears spring up and well up and spill over on her cheeks, and she wipes at them until Davos pulls her in for a hug.  _He_  is unbothered by the affliction on her face, doesn’t care in the slightest when she rests her scarred, ugly cheek on his shoulder, and she closes her eyes as he smoothes a hand down her hair. Half of her wants to pretend it’s her father, but he was never that affectionate to begin with, and now he is dead, and she is too old to play make believe, anymore.

 

The dreams start out differently but they always end the same. Black and white, maybe subdued colors, sometimes the touch of a woman or perhaps some half-remembered family vacation, sweet and silent, soft and safe. But then it bleaches out to hot sun and sweat, to the sudden racket of his friends being blown apart and the ringing of it in his ears. The sound and shake of roller coasters becomes the pepper and recoil of gunfire. The naked woman in his dreams sinks and flattens to a desert, white saturates with blood and he is awake, trembling and sightless for several seconds as he stares at the ceiling of his bedroom. The wet on his face isn’t tears and it isn’t sweat this time, though, it is the wet of a tongue-slick kiss, one he wipes off after a moment or two of discombobulation.

“Shaggydog,” he says, neither admonition nor greeting, just a simple statement to remind himself that he’s here, he’s back home, that’s is over and half a year in his past.

He takes a long, shuddering breath as the wolf hybrid hops onto the bed uninvited, licking his face several more times before walking in a circle, trampling half the pillow next to his. He lies down with a  _whumph_  and a world-weary sigh all dogs seem to have after a long night of lying around the house. Rickon rolls onto his back, swiping his fingers across his eyes to pinch the bridge of his nose. A glance to the alarm clock on his nightstand tells him it’s almost five in the morning, and he supposes that after six months that’s progress.

“Almost made it three hours this time,” he says. Maybe one day he’ll actually  _need_  an alarm to wake him.

He has gone for a run, eaten breakfast and showered, has practiced his calm breathing before Bran so much as wakes up. Rickon sits with his laptop at the kitchen table, bare feet propped up on the rungs of his chair, counts to eight when his brother’s bedroom door opens. There is a thud and a groggy  _Fuck_  from the hallway on eight, and Rickon can’t help but huff a laugh.

“That stupid corner, every damn time,” his brother mutters, shaking his right hand as he expertly wheels himself one handed into the kitchen. “I should just tear down the wall, I’m already in the narrowest chair I could afford.”

He blows on his banged knuckles before raking his hair from his eyes, rummages around in the lower cabinets where nearly everything is stored and sets about to make himself cereal. Rickon knows better than to try to actively help. He’s only lived here with Bran a few months but he well remembers what reaction an attempt to grab the milk from the fridge will get.  Creativity is required.

“You left the milk out,” Bran says. He reaches up to sling a finger around the handle of the half-gallon jug, sets in next to a bowl of dry cereal in his lap as he wheels over to the kitchen table. Shaggydog is an inquisitive snuffle and sniff but Bran pushes his head away with a lazy nudge of his palm.

“My bad,” Rickon shrugs, returning his attention to his emails.

It’s quiet save for the rhythmic clatter of a spoon against the edges of a bowl and the crunch of cereal that eventually quiets to just Bran’s jaws working as the milk does its trick and softens the flakes to mush. Peace. Quiet. Rickon breathes in, and Rickon breathes out. Shaggydog curls up under the table, his long hair a tickle at their feet though Bran can’t feel it, and Rickon takes one foot off his chair to rest against the dog’s belly. Peace. Quiet.

“So, what’s the plan for the day,” Bran says after a few minutes when his cereal is gone and his bowl is empty. Rickon inhales, looks up from the laptop screen to the backyard beyond the sliding glass door. It’s June but deliciously overcast, the cloud cover a respite from the beating sun though they bring in the humidity with them.

“Therapy, same as yesterday,” he says.

“Group or individual?”

Rickon sighs.

“Group,” he says finally, and his brother knows how he loathes it, almost as much as the sleep meds that make him feel like he’s drowning in mud. Seeing the other veterans there with their prosthetics and scars makes him miserable. He can see Wex bleeding out in the dirt whenever he sits across from them, can feel the scald of the sun, can hear the screaming.

Survivor’s guilt, they call it.  _If this is surviving, it fucking sucks._

“Well,” Bran says after a couple of moments, “at least it’s only an hour. Maybe afterwards you can get enough downtime to come hang out at mom and dad’s tonight. Robb’s out of the hospital and they want to celebrate. Dad’s making pollo asada on the grill, I guess,” Bran says.

Rickon thinks of his older brother, wonders how in the hell every single Stark brother has managed to fuck themselves up one way or another.

“I mean, between your PTSD and my damned legs, we should start a club and initiate big brother into it,” Bran says as if he’s reading his mind. “Although neither of  _us_ was stupid enough to break a leg playing fucking football,” he says, and Rickon can’t help but laugh.

“Maybe,” he says after a few chuckles against his closed fist, earning a grin and nod from his older brother.

They move to the den and watch a movie in companionable silence, two brothers on disability, one banged up on the outside, the other on the inside, one as content with silence as the other is with not speaking.  _At least I have Bran,_  he thinks of the one sibling who seems to inherently get it.  _At least I have Shaggydog,_  he thinks, petting the wolf whose head is resting in his lap, as comfortable on a sofa as he is in Rickon’s bed.

 

“You’re sure you’re ready to go through all of this now?” Davos murmurs as Mel waves off the last of the mourners, standing with a lean against the open front door as if she’s saying goodbye to a gaggle of girlfriends instead of people who came to pay her dead husband their respects.

He and Shireen are standing in the living room just outside her father’s office where she’s finally kicked off her heels, and he has an unmarked manila folder tucked under his arm. The only remaining people here are Robert and Cersei, ever eager for news of inheritance. Her red-cheeked, bearded uncle is wedged in an arm chair in the living room sucking down a neat bourbon, her aunt sitting on the arm of the leather sofa beside him, talking on the phone in muted, conspiratorial undertones. Shireen cannot wait to see the look on her face when she hears the bad news.

“If she insists on reading the will tonight, then so be it. It’ll get those two out of my hair, and get Mel out of my dad’s house all the sooner,” she whispers, brushing bruschetta crumbs off of Davos’s lapel.

“It’s your house now, Shir,” he says, and his eyes are wrinkled and sympathetic, full of warm  sorrow with the setting sun bathing his face through the western facing window.

It will take some time getting used to, being mistress of this house; perhaps she will  _never_  get used to it. _Maybe I’ll sell it,_ she thinks sadly. Her father was not an affectionate man but he cared in his own way; he raised her largely by himself after her mother left them, made sure she had access to whatever she needed throughout college. There are no memories here of giggle-drenched tickle fights or watching cartoons together, but there are memories of her father helping her study until the late hours of the evening, even when he had to get up early for work. There are no memories of her father flipping pancakes on Saturday mornings, but there are memories of him sitting with her on the sofa with her when she was sick as a dog, the flu or the chicken pox or scarlet fever. He wasn’t friendly but he was steadfast. He wasn’t cuddly but he was loyal. He was her father, and he is gone now.

_There’s no way I could get rid of this house._

She is already seated in her father’s office when Mel drifts in with a fresh drink and a too-broad smile for Robert, and he accepts both with a wander-eyed chuckle that makes Shireen turn towards the desk and give Davos a glare at their gall. _Are you kidding me,_ she mouths, and Davos just closes his eyes with a slight shake of his head. Shireen whips around in her chair in time to see Mel sit with her legs crossed in the seat beside hers, adjusting the collar of her black blouse with a glance down at the hint of her cleavage, to see Robert stare at her calves as he takes a seat behind her.

“My father would  _not—_ “she starts, but Davos clears his throat.

“Your father would be happy to know his family is here now,” he says, smoothing over her outburst. “Shireen, Robert, Cersei,” he says, lifting his eyes to her when she finally deigns to enter the room, standing behind her husband. “Mel,” he adds lightly, the vaguest of afterthoughts. Her stepmother of two years laces on an expression of neatly arranged sadness.

“We’re happy to be here, Davos,” Robert says, draining his drink and setting the empty glass on the floor under his chair.

It’s a bald faced lie, bold as anything, and there is a moment of tight, uncomfortable tension as everyone chews on it. No one is happy; one of them is excited, the other drunk, one of them salivating and the other, the last, _she_ is wrung out from her true loss. Shireen inhales, long and slow, fills her lungs with air as she gazes around at her father’s office. There is the dusty old painting of a ship at sea, the small cherry wood humidor he keeps stocked for clients who visit and other friends who may smoke, though he never partook himself. There is the entire wall of books to her left, beside which her relatives all wait with bated breath for the handouts that won’t come.

“Let’s, let’s just get through this unpleasant business quickly,” Cersei says, and as blasé as she makes it sound Shireen can’t help but notice her phone is finally put away, and it’s an alert expression, sharp as the stilettos on her feet, poised like an animal ready to pounce.

It takes no time at all, is as quick as Cersei wanted it, when Davos informs them that all of Stannis’s money and property is to go down to Shireen. The dumbstruck silence, she expected, the mutterings of a half-drunk uncle muttering about her father’s stinginess, but not the outbursts from both Cersei and Mel. Her stepmother goes so far as to lean forward and slam her fist on the corner of the desk, making Davos raise his eyebrows as he peers at her over the rims of his eyeglasses, the slim folder of paperwork open in his hands. Cersei is a flash of angry green eyes and white teeth and she snarls about disrespect to the family, about how a Lannister would _never_ do such a thing.

“Ladies, please,” Davos says with a sigh. “I am sure Stannis had his reasons, Cersei,” he begins, but she is already tugging on her husband’s arm.

“Go to hell, Davos,” she snaps. “I told you, Robert, he wouldn’t give you so much as a second thought.”

Shireen finds that funny, considering how they haven’t broken bread over a holiday meal together since she wore Mary Janes and frilly socks to school. Robert heaves to his feet, muttering about the hissing and spitting of cats, tosses out a goodbye to Shireen as he is dragged from the office. She holds her head in her hand with her elbow resting on the armrest of her chair, lets the storm see itself out, a stream of swear words and more colorful terms for “selfish” left behind in its choppy wake.

“As for you, Mel, I’m sure you know full well why Stannis has changed this,” Davos says, closing the folder in his hand.

She gets to her feet and snatches the folder from his hands, and her fingers tremble when she fumbles to open it once more. Mel paces the floor, not so graceful and elegant now in her silk blouse and pencil skirt. Gone is the ethereal drift of a seductress, here is the staccato pacing of a woman who has had the rug pulled out from her. Shireen would be smirking if she didn’t feel so apprehensive.

“This is bullshit,” she snaps, spinning around to face them with the dig of her high heel into the plush carpeting. Mel rips the will and folder in half and tosses one piece to Davos and one to Shireen, who flinches even though it simply falls onto her lap.

“It’s not the only copy,” Davos says dryly, removing his spectacles to clean them with his pocket square. “We all of us know why you’re cut out, Mel.  Stannis found out about you and your dalliances and changed it immediately. He was due to speak with a divorce attorney next week, but then the unthinkable happened. Calm down before you embarrass yourself further, the house is Shireen’s, the money, all of it,” he says, replacing the glasses on his nose.

“And I want you out,” Shireen says, gripping the torn half of the will and standing so she’s not the only one of them seated, so she can show she’s strong too. _I’m a Baratheon. I am stronger than the nails holding this house together._

“We’ll have to see about that,” Mel says, the flush of rage gone, smoothness and calm back in place, and that more than the flare of temper has Shireen nervous. “My beloved husband changes his will and dies soon after bequeathing everything to his conniving daughter?”

“I am _not_ conniving,” Shireen snaps, tapping Mel in the chest with the corner of the folder half, not quite believing she just did that.

“Prove it to a jury,” she says with a wide eyed shrug. “I’m sure many people would agree that it looks somewhat suspicious, so much so that a grieving widow is forced, _forced_ to have it looked into. Having to contest a will alone will be hard enough on me, but now it looks like, what with this new information,” she says, leaning in to tug the ripped papers and folder from Shireen’s hand, “I’ll have to look into his death as well.”

Shireen gasps, looks to Davos who is staring at Mel as if she has two heads. _She’s definitely two-faced, so it wouldn’t be that big of a stretch._ Her stepmother turns to leave her father’s office, has the nerve to sway her hips on her way out.

“The will is airtight,” Davos calls after her. “You can’t fight it, Mel, just give up.”

“Where there’s a will,” she says with a rich smile at her own play on words, “there is _always_ a way. Now if you’ll both kindly get out of my house, I have to get my rest. It’s been a long, trying day,” she says, and then she’s gone, closing the wooden French doors behind her with a soft click, leaving them both standing there, stupefied.

“Don’t let her worry you, it’s just the anger talking,” he says as they sit on the front porch steps while Shireen sets her purse down and slips back into her heels. “Trust me; I’ve seen it plenty of times, anger at being powerless when so much was within reach, anger at losing at their own game. It’ll fade, kiddo, I promise,” he says, standing with a grunt and offering her a hand up.

“I don’t know, she seemed awfully serious,” Shireen says with a wince as her shoes rub against the blisters on her heels.

“Even if she tries to contest it, there’s nothing she can really do except tie it up in the courts for a while. And if we have to play really dirty, we can get tabs on the man she slept with to prove Stannis had reason to change his will, even though that absolutely isn’t necessary.”

They make their way down the walk towards Davos’s car, and she frowns over her shoulder at her father’s house. _Mine, it’s_ my _house,_ she tells herself as she gets into the passenger side of Davos’s sedan, but she is not so sure, and Shireen chews her lip as she watches the house recede as he backs down the driveway. It’s a sprawling palace of Southwestern design, manicured front yard lit here and there with low lighting, its earth tone adobe blending in with the desert landscape of the foothills behind it. _I should take a picture,_ she thinks.

“Shit!” Shireen clenches her eyes shut and sighs. “Stop the car, I forgot my purse,” she says, shaking her head when Davos offers to pull forward back to the house. “Don’t worry, I just left it on the porch. I’ll just run up and grab it. Don’t drive off and leave me here now,” she says with a smile as she kicks her shoes off again, leaving the passenger side door open after she steps out.

Shireen sprints up the paved driveway to the house on the balls of her feet, happy for the relatively mild June day, though she’s still panting with a slick of sweat on her lower back beneath her dress when she finally gets to the porch. She takes the first step and then leans forward, half crawling on her hands to the top step where her purse sits. _Idiot,_ she thinks as she straightens and turns to head back to the driveway.

“Yes they’ve left, do you think I’d call you if they were still here? How stupid do you think I am?”

She freezes, lifts her head as she strains to pick up on her stepmother’s voice. She turns in the semi darkness of an early summer evening, trying to figure out where it is coming from, but then she hears the flick of a lighter and smells the bloom of cigarette smoke on the thick, warm air. _Mel must be on the side of the house._ There is a little conversation area on the east side of the house where her father used to drink his morning coffee, and soon the scrape of a metal chair on flagstone confirms her suspicions.

“I don’t care what that little bitch thinks, but I’ll tell you this much, if she thinks I’m letting her get away with this, she’s a bigger idiot than her father. I’ll kill her with my bare hands if I have to.”

Shireen claps a hand over her mouth to smother the gasp at the sound of Mel’s laughter after such a comment, walks rather than runs back to Davos’s car where it idles in near silence at the bottom of the driveway. _Stay cool, stay cool, stay cool._

“Oh my god, let’s get the hell out of here,” she says with a hiss when she’s back in his car, and she doesn’t fully slam the car door until he’s two houses down the street. Her heart hammers in her chest, doesn’t slow even though she tries to comfort herself with the knowledge that people make empty threats all the time.

“Why, what happened? You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says, glancing to her from the road every few seconds, oncoming streetlights illuminating his frown of concern in washes of greens and reds.

“Let’s just say that I think she’s serious,” Shireen says, thinking she will never quite forget the sound those words make, the implications of such a statement and the shiver she felt down her spine when she heard it.

_I’ll kill her with my bare hands if I have to._


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/121321499443/http-archiveofourown-org-works-4109653-chapters-9)

“Sandor, why don’t you start the group this afternoon? It’s been a couple of weeks since you’ve done so,” says the therapist with his long distance amiability, his forearms braced on his thighs with his clasped hands bridging his knees.

Rickon’s eyes burn from fatigue even though he fell asleep on the sofa watching The Fountain with Bran, and his vision has glazed over at this point, but when Sandor speaks to his right he jerks back to attention.

“I talked last week. Let some of these others start it off and ramble on,” says the big man, sitting back and slouching in his metal chair with his arms crossed over his wide chest. Rickon glances at him from his nearly identical repose, and Sandor catches his eye.

“Make this kid talk. He _never_ talks,” Sandor says.

“Rickon, how do you feel about that?” asks the therapist.

He stifles a groan and buys some time with a gaze around the room. He tries to avoid their faces, focusing instead on the elementary school classroom and the cheerful pictures tacked up on one of the walls. They appear to be self-portraits, all gap toothed smiles and yarn for hair, girls with red circles of construction paper for blush and macaroni for necklaces, boys with misshapen baseball hats glued on mostly bald heads. There is no color dark enough for Rickon’s self-portrait, not that he much stares in the mirror these days to figure out what he looks like. His gaze finally falls like snow on everyone’s faces.

There’s blonde Brienne with the jagged mess of gnarled skin on her face, the stitch mark scars not much better, and pretty boy Jaime next to her with the metal hand that will move if Jaime thinks about it. They fought in Afghanistan, Rickon knows from the many times they’ve spoken aloud in group. He thinks they might be sleeping together on account of how they always sit together, but he isn’t sure; Rickon certainly isn’t boning Sandor, and he prefers to sit next to the big scarred guy more than the others.

On his left between him and the therapist is Barristan, the grizzled old vet from Vietnam who walks with a cane, though his limp is nothing compared to Colonel Tyrell’s from Iraq. That poor bastard has had more surgeries than Rickon has fingers, and he has all of them, unlike Jaime. And there’s Rama Duda with his prosthetic leg up past the knee, who fought last year against ISIS just like Rickon, though he was RAF and they never once clapped eyes on each other.

“Who is this kid, Marcel Marceau? He never talks though the rest of us do all the damned time. Thinks he’s a special case,” mutters Alliser from the far curve of the circle across from Rickon.

“Considering a DUI got you a court-order that landed your arse in here, you’re probably mandated to speak,” Rama says, his words clipped sharp with an English accent and a healthy dose of derision. He’s rubbing at his thigh where the prosthetic meets flesh, and Rickon winces, looks away, squeezes his eyes shut against the memory.

_Osha’s leg blown apart from her body and lying in the dirt road like garbage flung from a car on the interstate. He knew it was hers from the hot pink bandana tied around the ankle of her combat boot. He screamed so loud his voice disappeared. She never made it out of the truck. “So they can identify me,” she’d joked once. Nobody is laughing now._

“Oh shut up, towelhead,” Alliser says.

“His name is Ramaadiyyu, asshole” snaps Brienne, halfway out of her chair before Jaime puts his good hand on her arm to stay her.

“Everyone, calm down. Alliser, enough of that crap,” EB reprimands. “Keep it up and you’ll lose your place, and then you have nowhere else to go but prison,” he says as Alliser, Rama and Brienne bicker at each other.

“I don’t have anything to say,” Rickon says with a raised voice, lifting his eyes to their therapist, a challenge on one end, a vague sort of musing on the other. _Go ahead and read my mind,_ he thinks. _Dig around there, feel free to rip it all out and keep it for yourself._

Everyone pauses mid-argument to turn and look at him and then look at EB like it’s a tennis match. There are a few moments of silence before their therapist finally nods.

“Maybe next week,” he says lightly.

Rickon nods once and lifts his attention to the ceiling tiles, and he begins to count the pinholes in the one above Alliser’s head, hoping the thing falls on the son of a bitch. He gets to 158 before his eyelids droop.

“How’s Osha’s dog working out? He behaving himself?” the therapist asks after group, once everyone has left the room.  

Rickon dozed off towards the end, and as a result he is the last to leave, the last one stuck in this room of burgeoning knowledge and the start of adolescence. It is strange to him, having traveled across the world and back, all to find himself back here. He shakes himself from his thoughts, stands and stretches, unapologetic for his almost-nap.

“Shaggy’s great,” he says, and they stand there looking at one another, a stalemate until EB chuckles and shakes his head.

“Give me _some_ detail, Ric. It’s not like I don’t know what happened over there, it was in your file the docs sent over. You won’t be breaking some sort of code or vow if you talk to me.”

It makes it worse, that someone else knows, that so many of them do. The Army doctors, the board, his therapist. _Batshit Rickon with an M16, tears streaming down his dirt-streaked face._ He sighs, mutters to himself before finally speaking.

“The dog is fine. He’s- he, uh,” Rickon says, stopping himself with the clearing of his throat. “He’s helping me. Honestly. Her husband was an idiot to give him up. He’s a good dog and he’s uh, you know, the dreams and stuff. He seems to know. Understand, I mean. To pick up on them, I mean,” he says, and he sighs. Speaking is exhausting, and he feels like a wrung out dish rag.

“Her husband gave him up because the dog tried to bite him on several occasions. He thought about putting him down, but couldn’t do it, not to his wife’s dog,” EB says.

“Well, good for fucking him,” Rickon snaps. “That dog is probably saving my goddamned life, and that asshole wanted to put him down. Osha would have risen from the grave just to slap the shit out of him if he’d done that,” he says with vehemence. It surprises him when he realizes that his hands are clenched into fists at his sides, and he shakes them out, stretches his fingers. Suddenly he feels looser.

To his surprise Elder Brother laughs, claps him on the shoulder and escorts him to the door, Rickon wearing an expression of confusion. The empty school hallway is soothingly dark and cool, the A/C a lulling nonstop whir thanks to the heat outside.

“There you go, Ranger, that’s what I’m talking about. Now, was that so hard?”

 

Gendry is leading her across a green grass meadow high up on Mt. Lemmon, the steep slope dotted with burned tree trunks from a fire years ago, scattered across with wildflowers and pine tree saplings that wag cheerfully in the gusts of wind that blow into the mountainside. The air is thin and the sky is clear, bluer than the sea, and the grasses brush her bare legs and the hems of her shorts as she follows the narrow deer path that cuts across and leads them towards thicker tree cover. She’s out of breath as she works hard to keep up with her cousin’s tireless energy and a stride that is at least a foot longer than her own, is sweating from being so much closer to the sun up here. She’s rummaging around in her backpack for more sunscreen, twisting at the waist as she shrugs off one strap when she runs right into him.

“Jesus, Gen, what the hell,” she says, her nose stinging from the impact on his shoulder blade, but he shushes her, points to the tree line on the edge of the meadow where her small outburst has already alerted seven white tailed deer to their presence.

“Don’t move, and _please_ shut up,” he whispers, lips barely moving as he slowly lowers his hand.

He has brought her up here a week after the funeral to try and take her mind off of things, and for the moment it’s working, because _now_ she is truly breathless, heart a little tin drum in her chest at so lovely a sight. But no matter how still and quiet they are now, the damage is done, and with the flick of a few tails the little group is gone, impossibly slender legs kicked up and tucked up as they bound away, disappearing amongst the brown and green of pines and beds of their needles.

“Oh,” she says on the exhale of her held breath, and she thinks she may be a fool for how _rejected_ their departure makes her feel, as if she is not already empty, as if she is not already abandoned by her parents, one by choice and the other by death. _Why is it so easy to leave me_? “Oh, damn,” she says, and to her embarrassment but perhaps not to her surprise, Shireen bursts into tears.

Gendry spins around, almost hitting her in the face again with his shoulder, and he pulls her in for a hug, giving her back a few pats of his hand.

“Hey. Hey, it’s okay, they’re just deer. Just dumb deer,” he adds as she cries against his chest. He smells of sweat and the sun, smells familiar, and though the latter should comfort her it only serves to make her feel than much more alone.

“I’m sorry, I’m just stupid. Like a deer,” she says with a watery, hiccupy laugh, pulling away to wipe her nose on her long sleeve, to try and pull herself together.

“You aren’t stupid, dummy, you’re just, you know, you’re in mourning,” he says with a sigh. “Maybe this was a bad idea. Don’t girls like to cry and eat ice cream or something when they’re sad?”

“That’s for a breakup, you goofball,” she says, and he smiles sheepishly with a shrug as he slings his arm across her shoulder.

Gendry leads her back the way they came until they find a huge, half burned log on its side, half hidden in the tall grass. He sits her down, frees himself from his own pack and pulls out a large Nalgene water bottle and two granola bars, sitting down beside her. Shireen shrugs out of her backpack and lets the thing fall to the ground behind the log, leans forward as she unwraps her granola bar. The foil is a shiny pink that tells her the filling will be strawberry, and she watches the sun blink off of the wrapper before balling it up and shoving it in her pocket.

“I don’t even know what to do with myself, you know? The U of A gave me a leave of absence,” she says of her job, “so I’m just, ugh, I’m just sitting around, hating the feel of my own skin on my bones. It’s not like we were super close, my dad and I, but my mom’s been gone since I was like, ten. He’s all I’ve had, all I’ve known for almost 20 years, and now, nothing. Just like that, he’s gone. Like he never even existed,” she says, wiping her eyes with the back of a hand before tearing off a piece of bar and popping it in her mouth.

The sweetness is bright tang on her tongue, contrasted to the syrupy sorrow she feels mired in, and the crumb-and-berry goo lodges in her throat until she takes a long, thirsty swig from Gendry’s water bottle. They eat in silence save for the occasional bird call, the whistle of the wind through boughs of green, springy pine needles, the wrinkle and crinkle of granola bar wrappers. She gazes at the meadow that unfurls from their feet down to where the slope dramatically cuts off into a cliff, and the foreground view deletes itself, allowing the vast background to take over with jagged outcrops here, pine-fuzzed gentle rolls there. Far, far beyond all of it is a slivered view of the desert valley below them, hard and baked brown like terra cotta tile.

“All right,” Gendry says finally, getting to his feet, and she is so lost in her surroundings she blinks with surprise, looking up at him. He gazes down at her with a resigned sort of smile. “Come on, let’s to my place,” he says, holding out his hand and pulling her to her feet. “If nature won’t get your mind off things, then maybe shitty daytime television will do the trick.”

He fills the void of an hour long car drive with talk about his new job and his new girlfriend, how the former is boring and the latter is a firecracker and how they seem to balance each other out. He’s waiting tables at a restaurant downtown, the one in the old train station depot, and while the tips are decent the fact that he met this woman Arya there is what seems to have taken the cake. She is small and scrappy, grey eyes clear and clever, writes with her left hand and eats like a trucker. Shireen shakes her head, smiling faintly as steers the car down the twists and turns of Catalina Highway until it finally bottoms out and straightens like a pin once they’re back down to the desert. She would say something like _Ah, young love_ but he is five years older than she is, and it would end up sounding bitchy and bitter with the sad way she shapes her words these days.

“Hey, I said _my_ house. I gotta feed my fish,” he says when she turns into the depths of Sam Hughes. “We always hang at your house, and your creepy old landlady always gives me the eye,” he says.

“I swear we won’t stay long, let me just get a change of clothes. Come on, I’m sure she won’t bother you,” she says once they park in the driveway next to a huge house, east coast in design and one of the larger manses in this historical neighborhood. They walk down the rest of the driveway towards the back and pass through a wrought iron gate to the little guest house she’s called home these past couple of years.

“Miss Baratheon,” someone says behind them, and it’s the reedy voice of her landlady, her flip-flops a shuffle and slap on the brick-laid drive behind them.

“Shut up,” Shireen hisses when Gendry groans, and she puts on a smile before turning to face her landlady, a wiry old woman in culottes and an orange polo shirt, a visor on the powder fluff of her hair and a sour expression cut into the wrinkles of her face.

“Hey, Mrs. Celtigar, how’re you this afternoon?” she says politely, because while her landlady can sometimes be a bitch she is also giving Shireen an amazing deal in rent, and since her job in Admissions is only a few blocks away, she’ll gladly brown her nose to stay here.

“I was better before your rowdy friends came over and let themselves in, blaring that ugly music you kids listen to these days,” she says, snapping-turtle quick, hands on her hips as she peers at them, but then she smiles. “Oh, hello young man. Now _you,_ you I like. Always polite,” she says with an appraising eye, and Shireen would laugh if something didn’t sound _wrong_ just now.

“Friends? I don’t have a- I mean,” she says swiftly, pride stopping her from that admittance. “I mean, I don’t have any _rowdy_ friends. All librarian, professor types,” she says, turning away from her landlady with a frown, gazing at the ivy-choked little guest house tucked and half hidden amidst the palm trees and eucalyptus.

“Well, you just tell your library pals to keep it down next time. Have a good day, young man,” says Mrs. Celtigar.

Gendry is muttering under his breath about cougars and gross old ladies as he follows her, but she ignores him, because something isn’t right, here, not when her only two friends are an old lawyer and the man standing next to her and they neither of them come over unannounced or uninvited.

“Gendry,” she breathes, heart in her throat when she stops just short of her front door, which is just two hairs shy of being fully closed. “It’s unlocked, and I know I locked it. Oh Jesus, it’s unlocked,” she says, turning to see the concerned look on her cousin’s face when he braces his forearm across her collarbone.

Gendry pushes her aside, not ungently, off the little walkway and onto the meticulously tended lawn that separates her house from Mrs. Celtigar’s, tests the doorknob with a single twist, lets it crack open several inches.

“Get the fuck out of here,” he booms, already deep voice dropping into ominous, scary-guy territory.

They stare at each other as they wait, Gendry frowning, Shireen trying as hard as she can not to scream. She is terrified that they will hear someone reply, even more afraid of someone bull-rushing the door in some desperate final move, and she presses a hand to her heart as they stand there. She feels her pulse pound against her palm, thinks of the one time she caught a moth in her hands when she was a little girl. Gendry nods once when there is no reply, pushes the door all the way open. _No, not all the way,_ she thinks, _just as far as it can go,_ because halfway through its swing it stops short, and they hear the crunch of broken glass, the groan of splintered wood when Gendry gives it another shove.

 

“Do any talking this time?” Jojen asks, not bothering to glance sideways.

They sitting outside in the backyard, side by side on the steps leading down to the pool, and they watch Shaggydog trot in lazy figure eights and sloppy circles in his parents’ backyard, nose to the ground, chasing scents of ground squirrels between the mesquite trees and Mexican birds of paradise. He takes a drag of his cigarette and stares at its ash a moment before exhaling and passing the smoke to Rickon.

“Nope,” Rickon says, setting his beer down between his feet as he accepts the offer, pinching the butt between his finger and thumb like a joint.

He inhales sharply, nods his thanks when he passes it back to his brother’s live in boyfriend, and Jojen nods as he takes the cigarette back. Through the sliding glass door they can hear the raucous commotion that only a large family can make, especially with extra people added to the mix. Robb is here with the first girlfriend he’s had since he divorced Jeyne, and with his crutches and the mulish insistence he help clean up the dishes after dinner he’s like a bull in a china shop. This is the second family dinner Rickon’s been to since he moved back to Tucson, since he came back different and broken and indecipherable. His head is already filled with noise; these dinners are going to be the end of him. 

“Well, you’ll talk when you want to, and if you never want to then you won’t,” Jojen says, the tousle of his hair pulled back with a headband.

“Yep,” Rickon says. He squints through the late afternoon sun and the glitter of the water’s surface in the pool, its painted bottom coloring the water an icy sapphire blue.

They turn in unison towards the TV area’s sliding door behind them when there are two sharp raps of knuckles on the glass, and it’s his father gesturing for them to come in, as clear a summons as any. The soldier in him stands immediately after picking up his half-empty beer, and the eternal grad student in Jojen takes his sweet ass time, brushing out the cigarette ember against the cool decking beside his bare feet.

“What’s up,” Rickon asks once they’re inside the cool house, Shaggydog’s nails clicking on the tile as he just squeezes past Jojen, banging his long ribcage against the door, knocking it open a few more inches.  

“Arya’s beau brought someone who might need to hire us out,” he starts, and Rickon sighs.

“More people, huh,” he says, wondering when family dinners turned into open houses. _Next time I’m bringing Sandor,_ he thinks.

“Yeah, but I want you to be a part of it, take advantage of all that training. I want your input. Yours too,” he says to Jojen, whosnorts a laugh as he flings himself back onto the sofa, already reaching for the remote.

“Liar,” Jojen says, making Rickon’s dad chuckle.

There are extra voices now drifting through the open floor kitchen from the dining room, a feminine rise and fall and the deep rumble of a man, and he is bracing himself for shrill introductions and forced handshakes when Ned stops to lean against the granite countertop.

“Aren’t we going in? So I can throw my weight around like a badass,” he says, cracking a smile when his father laughs.

“We are, but I just wanted to give you a head’s up, son. You know Robb’s out of commission right now, and there’s a chance this woman might need more than a security system or drive by surveillance. She’s pretty worked up and uh, apparently she’s willing to put down a large sum of money,” he says.

“Okay,” Rickon says slowly, giving his father a hard, sharp look. “What does this have to do with me?”

His father sighs, bows his head and rubs his forehead with his fingertips, and the stalling tactic sets Rickon on edge.

“Dad, tell me. What, you want me to like, go undercover and spy for this chick, or what?” It’s not entirely unappealing to him, especially if he can work solo. Ever since the incident, the idea of working with people, being responsible for watching their backs, is abhorrent.

“No, not exactly,” his father says quietly. “You know what Robb does,” and finally he brings his gaze up from the floor, squares it on his son. To his credit, he does not flinch, even at his son’s reaction.

“Jesus, dad, a fucking _bodyguard_? You want _me_ to do that?” Rickon flings up his arms, turning away from his father, brings his hands to his close cropped hair.

EB’s voice is in his head, telling him to get back into the world, to stop hiding away and running away from everything. Working for his father is something he has run from ever since he was 17 and started training six days a week for the military. _You should give it a try,_ he imagines Elder Brother saying. _I know it can be hard. But I was in the Marines for 30 years, Ric. Don’t waste your knowledge,_ he imagines.

“Son, you were in the Rangers, I’m sure you could use those skills to your advantage. I know you- I know you’re going to therapy, and you’re working through some stuff,” Ned tries carefully when Rickon finally turns back to face his father.

“You have _no_ idea,” he mutters, shaking his head with his eyes closed.

“I would if you would just _tell_ us. If you would just tell me, Rickon, I would _know,_ I could _help,_ ” Ned says. The exasperation that bleeds through the calm makes Rickon open his eyes.

His dad pushes off of the counter to take a step towards his youngest son. He looks tired with his hair starting to salt through with grays, looks harried, older. Ric wonders if it’s Bran’s accident or Robb’s there in his frown lines, if they have anything to do with what went down in Iraq, but then again, as his father says, nobody here knows.

“Don’t worry about it,” Rickon says. “I’ll do your work for you if she wants it. Fuck it, I could use the money,” he says, leaving out any mention of the disability checks that come once a month. It’d be nice to buy some better beer, to buy a new pair of jeans, to put money towards the cable bill since he’s up most of the night watching it.

“If it gets too much for you, just let us know. Arya could even split the shifts with you, you know how eager she is to get in on stuff like this,” he says, following Rickon as he strides out of the kitchen.

“Yeah, yeah, split the shift, whatever,” he says, rounding the corner into the dining room just as a brown haired woman comes out of it.

Her palms just catch his chest before her face collides with his sternum, and his hands dart up to her shoulders where he pins her in place, drawing himself back to see who the hell this woman is. She is short like his sister but with blue eyes instead of gray, with hair that is, on second glance, a crow’s wing black, not brown like Arya’s. And then his eyes lower to her cheek, to how the scars dance when she speaks.

“Oh my God, I’m sorry, I was, I mean I wasn’t looking. Well I was looking but I didn’t see you there,” she says, nervous stammer and wide eyes, an attempt at a smile though it’s clear they neither of them feel like smiling. He can pick up on the fear and agitation coming off of her and it ignites both inside him, here in his heart where they live and never sleep. The scars on her face make him think of Sandor, make him think of gunfire and the loud crack of an explosion, make him think of Wex, and he whips his hands off her, steps back, feels her hands fall away from his chest. His skin feels hot from the touch.

“Your face,” he murmurs. He is bewildered, barely registers her gasp of shock, the rising ringing in his ears drowning out Arya’s _Goddammit Rickon,_ and he turns on his heel, narrowly avoids colliding into his father on his way to the backyard where it’s quiet, where it’s safe, where there are no wraiths to haunt him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rama Duda is Grey Worm. Many huge thanks to HeyYou for the Arabic translation :)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/121703026628/a-world-apart-chapter-3)
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> [Mrs. Celtigar! YASSSS](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/122722827037/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)

Shireen watches him walk out of the room all stalking stride like a wild animal, stands there with her jaw dropped in shock over such a blatant cut-down. Whispers and stares she is used to, but never someone taking her in literal hand to give her such a scornful look, such a brutal assessment. There is a brief moment in his wake when everyone in the dining room is silent. Eddard and his wife Catelyn are wearing varied expressions of mortification, the former shaking his head with his eyes closed as he pinches the bridge of his nose, the latter looking up at the ceiling mid-sigh. The others are all staring at one another, Gendry and Shireen included; she makes eye contact with the auburn haired woman named Sansa, who frowns at her a moment before snapping to action.

“Excuse me just a moment, I’m going to go talk to him. I’m so sorry, Ms. Baratheon, he’s um,” Sansa says as she leaves, waving her hand in an aimless gesture as if to explain it all away.

 _He’s feral and was raised by wolves_ or  _He spent his formative years in a hermit’s cave_ or the one she knows, the one she doesn’t have to invent,  _He has never seen such an ugly face._

“All right, well, I think Sansa spoke for all of us when she apologized, Ms. Baratheon,” Eddard says. “Accept _all_ of our apologies for that exchange.”

“Please, call me Shireen, Mr. Stark,” she says with an inward shake of her senses, standing straighter as she turns to face him.

“Only if you’ll call me Ned,” he says with a scruffy smile, stoic and a little faded. She instantly likes him for it.  _He’s a warmer version of dad, maybe._

“No problem,” she smiles.

Soon they are settling around the dining table, and the quickness with which they produce notepads and pencils, a laptop for the wheelchair-bound brother named Bran, suggests that this room must double as a place to eat meals and a place to do business. She feels like a mob boss when the seat proffered her is at one end of the table, feels dwarfed and tiny at so large a table faced with so many people. Ned takes the other end of the table while a dark haired woman gets to her feet, kissing the cheek of the brother named Robb.

“I’m going to help your mom get refreshments,” she says, immediately staying him with a hand to the shoulder when he tries to stand up. “No way, buddy. You’ve done enough,” she says.

“Dacey, come on,” he says, but she shakes her head as she and Catelyn sail out of the room.

They all smile politely enough, brightly enough when it’s Gendry and Arya who keep sliding glances towards each other though they sit side by side, but there is no call to action, no move to even start a conversation. She takes the moment to gaze around the room, filling up the awkward silence with an attempt to learn more about this family.  There are no certificates of authenticity or diplomas mounted on the walls, though she supposes that would conflict with the room’s other function as family dining room. There are, however, a few black and white photographs of snow covered trees, of meadows blanketed in white, of misty, wind-whipped cliffs by an ocean that looks freezing to her. They’re lovely but don’t quite mesh with the saguaro cactus standing sentinel outside the window behind Ned.

“You must like the cold,” she says to no one in particular.

“We’re from Washington just off the coast, actually, but we moved down here ages ago, before Arya was born. Business stuff,” Ned says, his eyes leaving hers to somewhere behind her and over her head. “Ah, here we are.”

Shireen turns, expecting Catelyn and the woman named Dacey to be right behind her with drinks, but it is Sansa and her brother, the one she doesn’t know yet, the one who took one look at her and fled. He’s standing with an unopened bottle of beer in his hands, twisting it to and fro as if he was trying to wring someone’s neck. She stays in her seat but feels her hackles raise, feels the strong woman in her clench her fists in anticipatory defense of the insecure girl with a cheek full of scars. She twists in her seat a little more to face him, to show him she isn’t scared, to tell him to fuck off if she has to.

“This is Rickon, Ms. Baratheon,” Sansa says when they’ve come to stand by her chair, and she nudges him, the cap of her shoulder a light punch against his. “He’s got something he’d like to say to you.”

Shireen looks at him, neck craned because she is still sitting and because he’s that much taller; she knows because she ran into him already, can only stare into his chest even if she stands as straight and tall as she can. He is staring at the floor, lifts a hand to rub the back of his neck. He is shadow-eyed and clench-jawed, he is  _reluctant_  to look at her again, and she will not sit helplessly for it, not after burying her father, not after coming home to a nightmare of broken glass and violated privacy. She stands.

It’s enough to startle the wild-creature avoidance of eye contact right out of him, and he lifts his eyes to hers, a blue that’s not quite, a green that’s hardly there, and more wariness than she’s ever seen in her life. He’s got an army grunt haircut and broad shoulders, though they are hunched up towards his ears now, the posture of an uncomfortable boy instead of an arrogant man. She looks up at him, daring him to make another comment, and she thinks he’s about to go for it, judging by the way his eyes move over her face, taking it all in. He breathes in, and he breathes out.

“Go ahead and tell me something else, because if you think that’s the worst I’ve—” she starts.

“I’m sorry,” he says, slicing the attitude right off her words as well as the rest of what she had planned to say. “You just reminded me of something. Someone. Something,” he says, clearing his throat. “But now that I see you, now that I uh, that I can see it better, it’s not like that at all. You’re not like what happened. So, I’m sorry.”

Shireen stares at him with her mouth open, feels the frown between her eyebrows like a thick cord of confusion. He was a deep, froggy ramble just then, words and phrases a tangle of old twine that even he seemed to find difficult to comb out.

“What in the hell are you talking about?” she says with a bemused shake of her head, and he shrugs, eyes half closing when he shakes his head as if it’s too much to explain, and she thinks it probably is.

He looks back at her, and the fear and repulsion that had danced across his face when they first met are both gone, just as the rapid way his gaze bounced around her features. It’s a clear cut, guileless look, his eyes to hers, something she can appreciate given how infrequently she receives such honesty.

“You know what,” she says after a moment, tipping her head as she looks at him, “it doesn’t matter. Consider yourself forgiven, Rickon,” she says, and it’s nearly tangible, the wave of relief that washes over the rest of the room at her words.

He cracks a smile with an exhale through his nose, nods at her as Sansa brushes past him to take a seat across from her sister.

Catelyn and Dacey materialize from nowhere with glasses and a pitcher of water, pinwheels of sliced lemon floating amongst the ice cubes and splintered orange and red from the sunset spilling in through the window. His mother asks Rickon to pour and he does so without question, with only a nod that she’s beginning to understand is his go-to reaction.

Mrs. Stark takes the chair to the right of her husband’s as Dacey pours herself a glass of water before excusing herself from the conversation, much to Robb’s visible disappointment as he watches her leave the room. Rickon is the only one left standing, but then he inhales sharply, moves around the table to sit beside Shireen at her right hand side. He twists the cap off his beer and looks up at her.

“So,” he says. “What exactly happened?”

 

He feels foolish for having such a visceral and immediate reaction to her; now that he sees it, it’s nothing like the IED survivors he knows, is nothing at all like the burns that cover his friend’s left side. Whenever she turns to look at him in full as she does now, he sees it’s more road rash than anything. In high school Wylla had road rash all over her hip and thigh from falling off a quad on her driveway, and he certainly never had any problems with  _those_  scars, spent plenty of time mapping them out with his hands and his mouth. He flushes, feels a furious heat on his cheeks because of where his thoughts just scampered to, and he closes his eyes a moment, pulls his shit together and opens them to look at Shireen as she speaks.

A week ago she attended her father’s funeral and now she’s sitting here telling him, telling  _them_  about coming home with her cousin to a completely ransacked home, a destroyed laptop and a bathroom door hanging on its hinges. Not even her dishes were safe, not even her clothes or her books or her framed photographs. Nothing to her knowledge was stolen, but then, she didn’t linger long at the scene, she was so terrified.

“We’ll have to go back and look again,” Rickon says, lifting his eyes from his beer to their new client, the Ms. Baratheon who insists she be called Shireen.

 “Oh man, I don’t know, it’s so creepy, seeing all my stuff torn apart like that,” she says, voice dropping and hushing.

She rubs her mouth with her fingers as if trying to wipe away the worry, and he notices how she avoids even the slightest touch to her scars. It reminds him of Sandor, how even outside of group on the handful of occasions they went out for a beer afterwards, those scars were untouchable. It’s as if he and Shireen don’t even  _have_  those sides to their faces anymore.

“We’ll go with you,” Arya says, sitting forward to lean over the table and gaze down its length to Shireen. His sister is bold and unabashed, spent almost ten years of her life traveling abroad to see the world and harden her senses, but even Arya knows when to be gentle and sweet, and her grey eyes are soft when she looks at Shireen. “You won’t have anything to be scared of.”

“Okay, but that’s just it. You know, no offense, but what exactly  _do_  you do?” Rickon drinks his beer to hide his smile, to drown the laugh that suddenly wants to fight its way out of him.

“Everything,” Robb says. “If you need it, we’ll figure it out,”

Rickon sits back in his chair and looks at his brother behind their sister’s straight back and fall of red hair. Robb catches the look and returns it with a smile. He hums, almost chuckles, thinks about being thrown into the pool by his big brother when they were kids, thinks about playing ninjas and how despite the great age difference, Robb was never above reducing himself to play with his littlest sibling, because that’s it, that’s Robb, if you need something, he’ll do his damnedest.  _It was so long ago,_ he thinks, his mind drifting back to sun-soaked memories of his childhood, and he wonders why those are the ones so quick to leave, why the nightmares are so eager to move in and claim permanent residence.

“… and so that one job doing personal security, or PSD, for a politician’s backyard party turned into another and another. As the kids grew up and got interested in it they broadened the scope, so to speak. Sansa does the books now and Bran’s into computers and electrical. If you want to stay at your place we can install a security system for you, there will be no need to go to another company. Arya and Robb do the sort of detail I used to, but my reflexes aren’t so quick these days, and my aim isn’t so hot anymore either.”

“Aim?” Shireen asks, her fingertips a press and slide into and against the condensation of her glass. Rickon watches her, watches the rivulets of water slide down to pool around her glass on its coaster, and the chill from the beer bottle in his hands very nearly makes him shiver.

“You know, bang-bang,” he says, taking one cold hand from his beer to shape it like a gun, feeling like an idiot all of a sudden when she’s looking at him with a frown and a downward curl on the corner of her mouth that fights against the scars on her cheek.

“Detail? Guns? So you mean like a bodyguard? Black suits and sunglasses, that sort of thing?”

Arya laughs. “As adorable as I look in a suit, this is Tucson we’re talking about, we’d fit in better wearing cargo shorts and flip flops, to be honest. And as for guns, don’t worry, this situation of yours doesn’t really call for that. We’ll escort you home so you feel safe, and if anything else happens, we’ll address it as we get to it.”

“Anything else,” she murmurs, dropping her chin so suddenly her hair falls forward, obscuring the view of her face. If he thinks she’s about to cry he’s wrong, because suddenly she sighs and straightens, brushing her black hair from her eyes. “My stepmother, if I even have to call her that anymore, sort of threatened my life the day of my father’s funeral,” she says, her expression a perfect clash to the bold depth of her voice. He knows. He can see past it, because it’s the same front he uses, just in a different shape. She’ll use her words where he will use silence, but it’s the same damned thing.

“No shit,” Rickon murmurs, staring at her now, at blue eyes that are dark with grief and fear, with all of the things that say  _Home sweet home_ when they look into his soul.

“Yeah, well,” she says, smiling weakly to him before gazing around the table at everyone. “I hate to jump the gun or be paranoid or whatever, but I have a feeling I might need more than just a simple escort home,” and he sits there in silence, watching her as she explains about her late father’s wife, how her father Stannis discovered the affair in the weeks preceding his heart attack, how he made moves to cut her from the will, how violently she reacted.

“Are you sure the hit on your house isn’t coincidental?” his father asks, looking down at his notes as he continues to write feverishly. Bran is typing on his laptop while Sansa gazes at Shireen with sympathy and Arya murmurs something into Gendry’s ear.

“My place is a little guesthouse tucked way back from the road in Sam Hughes,” she says. “It would have to be an incredible coincidence, I think, considering you can’t even see it from the street.”

“All right,” Arya says, standing abruptly. “Then let’s check it out. If you want you can crash at our place,” she says, gesturing to her sister who stands as well.

“Absolutely,” Sansa says. “It sounds horrible, what they did to your place; no way would I want to stay there alone with it all torn up. I insist you stay with us.”

“So when you say you cover everything, I guess you really mean everything,” Shireen says when the rest of the family stands, Sansa and their father helping Robb as he hobbles clumsily to his feet. She smiles at Rickon when he stands, and it’s a watery, diluted thing that snares him in. “And what do you do, hmm? We’ve got alarm systems and body guards and roommates already. Are you the one who’s going to repair my little house? You gonna build a wall around me?”

Rickon shakes his head, drops his gaze to the half-shredded label on his bottle of beer, digs his thumbnail into the gummy glue still on the glass.

“Robb can’t do shit with a broken leg except set the table like a drunk dog on stilts. I’m gonna be your PSD,” he says, looking back up at her and her look of dawning realization. He cannot tell if it’s confusion or disappointment, though he supposes after what happened, he deserves both. “If you need me,  _I’ll_  be the wall around you.”

“Oh,” is all she says, and he supposes that will have to suffice.

 

They might all smile and bicker and argue like a typical family but they are well oiled when they clock in, and they take it all seriously. Sansa has her fill out paperwork and sign waivers, gives her a thin grey binder with their documentation and copies of their insurance policies and a section in the back with blurbs about each family member.

Robb has worked as Personal Security Detail –  _PSD_  she thinks, remembering Rickon’s term – for 16 years, ever since he graduated high school. Sansa didn’t join in until she got her degree in economics while Arya joined up last year as assistant to their brother Robb. Bran’s does not mention the reason he is unable to walk but it mentions a degree in computer science. Ned’s is as modest as can be, scant and simple sentences detailing nearly 40 years doing security detail with a man named Benjen. There is no mention of Rickon.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you weren’t really in the handbook thing Sansa gave me,” Shireen says as she drives away from his parents’ east side home, back down to the heart of the city where she lives.

It’s crowded for a summer night even though it’s Saturday, and the added time given to the ride back to her destroyed house only serves to increase her anxiety. She is desperate for a conversation to distract her, but this silent guy is all she has, considering Gendry opted to ride with Arya and is in the car behind them.

“I’m not in there at all, there’s no ‘really’ about it,” he finally says from the passenger seat beside her, motionless save for the occasional glance out the window or out the back of her Saab.

“May I ask why?” she says at a stoplight, looking at him with some exasperation, because it’s like pulling teeth, here. His head is tipped back against the seat’s headrest, and he rolls it towards her, pinning her in place with a solitary look. He is intense, more so now that he’s bathed in the red light from the intersection.

“I was in the army for the past five years,” he says before turning back to gaze forward. “I just got back a few months ago.”

“Oh,” she says as the light turns green, and she steps on the gas, feels the pull of forward motion inside her chest as they slide through the intersection and mingle with the other cars on the four lane road. “Well, you know, thank you. For your service, I mean.”

Rickon laughs, a loud humorless bark, and she is  _embarrassed._

“Yeah, no sweat, man. Anytime,” he says sarcastically, and she bites the inside of her cheek, scowls at the rollout of pin-straight street they’re on as the neighborhoods shift and bleed into one another, first a shitty one and next a quiet sleepy family burgh, a place with million dollar homes and back in the ghetto again. The silence stretches like the desert around them, like the palm trees up towards the sky. Long, steady stretches of brooding quiet.

“You know,” she says after several minutes of gathering courage, taking a turn into Sam Hughes with her cheek still pinned between her canines. “I’m having a pretty shitty day, but at least I’m still trying to be  _nice,_  here.”

Her hands shake when she pulls up to her driveway, and she’s not sure whether the tremble is from their not-an-argument or from the fact that she is back here again. She could  _smell_ the intrusion in the short moments Gendry and she lingered in her little adobe home with the red concrete floors and the bright oleander flowers that bob in the breezes outside her bedroom door. It was the tang of cheap cologne, and it was someone else’s, and it sent a sick chill slithering down into her belly then, just as the memory of it is doing to her now.

“I know,” he says once she’s turned off the car, parking far enough up the drive to let Arya’s Nissan fit in behind her. “And I appreciate that, I do. It’s just that I didn’t do anything that needs a thank you, that’s all.  At the end of the day, all that hard work, it just- talk about a fuckin’ waste,” he says, muttering to himself now more than to her.

“What- okay,” she says, giving up with a sigh. If she mentioned a bad time to someone it would be because she’s ready to talk about it, but clearly that’s not how this man works. It’s like picking a lock, every time he is goaded into speaking, and she’s already tired of it.

“Anyways, let’s go check this place out,” Rickon says as he opens the car door, slamming it shut before she has time to answer him.

“Fine, sure thing, man,” she snaps, alone inside the closed car, wrenching the keys from the ignition and grabbing her purse off the backseat. “Mister  _fucking_  Manners,” she says bitterly, wishing she hadn’t been so quick to forgive him up at his parents’ house, but then there is a click that makes her whip around to face forward. He is on her side of the car, holding her door open for her with his left hand as he stares over his right shoulder up the driveway towards her house.

“You’re right, you can’t see shit from the street. I can’t even see it from here,” he says when she’s standing on the driveway next to him, Gendry and Arya walking towards them as Rickon slams shut her door for her.  _I can almost see the black suit and shades,_  she thinks, slinging her purse on her shoulder as she folds her arms across her chest and walks past Mrs. Celtigar’s house towards her own.

“Shireen, stick back here with us,” Arya says quietly as they walk out of the orange glow cast down from the streetlights.

The driveway is black and her sight is obscured to near-blindness from the mature trees towering above them with their leafy canopies brushing the roof tiles of the main house. She blinks several times, trying to coax out her night vision and let her eyes adjust. It’s almost muggy, the air is so thick here, humidity increased from a well-watered backyard and from the entrapment of those overhead tree boughs. The four of them quiet down, slow down as they creep forward towards her guesthouse, and then there is a sound of glass sweeping across a concrete floor, the crunch of footsteps, and they all stop moving at once.

“Rickon, the porch light,” she murmurs, voice strained with fear. “I didn’t turn it on before I left,” she says when she realizes that the tiny porch of her house is lit up; she can see sprays of palm fronds illuminated by the light, can see the emerald green of Mrs. Celtigar’s yard that comes right up to her walkway.

“Stay behind me. Arya, stay with her,” Rickon murmurs, voice as basement deep and dark as the air around them.

She can just make him out as he drifts past her on silent tread, his arm a brace across her collar bones as his hand curls around her upper arm. He pushes her behind him, not ungently, as he makes her follow his command rather than waiting to see if she will do it herself. Shireen goes willingly, heart in her throat as she watches him prowl forward, and she thinks of cats, both big and small, and the onset of a hunt. There’s a brief moment before he gets to the little wrought iron gate, and he glances around, left and right, eyes trained on the near black ground at his feet. Suddenly he crouches down and picks something up, hefts it in his hand as he stands and straddles the wrought iron, pausing only a moment before swinging his other leg over the gate.

He moves quickly now that he’s bathed in the porch light, crossing the flagstone in two strides before pressing his back against the wall, face turned towards her front door. She can see now it’s a large jagged chunk of stone in his hands, and he lifts it as he crouches down, walking forward in a squat that’s low to the ground. Rickon is in her doorway now, peering inside the half-open doorway, before he audibly groans and stands, pushing open the door all the way.

There is a loud scream, and Rickon takes a backwards step out of the house as a coffee mug flies outside, just missing his head when he ducks right in time. It lands in the soft grass with a muffled thud, and Shireen stands in the dark driveway, staring with a mingle of curiosity and fear as Rickon chucks the piece of flagstone down next to the coffee mug.

“Are you fucking _kidding_ me?” he says to the intruder inside her guesthouse, arms spread wide in disbelief.

“How dare you speak to me like that on my own property, you thug,” says Mrs. Celtigar as she stalks out of the house towards Rickon, and he catches the second coffee mug when she hurls it at him, steps backwards as she storms towards him, all hell and fire and brimstone. “And how dare you return to the scene of the crime. What have you done to her, huh? Where is Shireen?” she snarls, and Rickon parries the slap she tries to aim at his face.

“Damn,” Gendry says from Shireen’s left.

“I  _like_  her,” Arya says from her right.

“I think he needs our help,” Shireen says, finally snapping free from the deer-in-headlights paralysis that comes from watching an absolute spectacle. “Mrs. Celtigar, wait, hang on a minute,” she calls as the three of them hasten to close the distance.

It’s more than a minute that’s required to diffuse the situation, to explain to her landlady what happened and why she and Rickon had such a standoff, though she does not mention Mel or what happened with the will and the phone call she overheard. They stand in her small living room amidst the wreckage of the life she put together over the past seven years of living on her own. She and Gendry side by side as Arya and Rickon pick their way through the mess, looking for signs of a break-in.

“If you want a sign of a break in, I suggest you take a gander at all of this mess,” Mrs. Celtigar snaps when Rickon drifts past her, and he spares no expense of expression when he glares at her over his shoulder.

“They didn’t teleport here,  _ma’am,_  if you catch what I mean. And no windows have been forced, and the lock hasn’t been either. Shireen, are you sure you locked up? Because they didn’t break and enter, they just entered.”

“I am absolutely sure,” she says, hugging herself as she looks around. “My dad’s the only one who has a key,” she says, and then she’s shaking like a leaf because she knows what that means. _He had a key, but who has it now?_ “Oh my God,” she says, and Mrs. Celtigar is a frown of confusion as Gendry puts his arm around her.

They explain, in halting back and forth as they make up a story for her landlady, that she must be upset because of her father’s recent death, that maybe she did forget to lock up, that there’s no reason to call the police because nothing was stolen, because they will simply write up the paperwork and file it away, and it will only waste everyone’s time.

“But fingerprints, they could dust for them,” Mrs. Celtigar says as Arya gently guides her out of the house.

“Cops won’t dust for prints just because of some vandalism,” she says as they step outside. “It’s just like they said, they’ll take a report and do nothing, which is why we’re here,” Arya’s voice fades as they cross the lawn towards the main house.

“Yeah, but _you_ guys could, right? I mean, you said at the table that you guys did everything basically, so why don’t _you_ dust for prints?” Gendry asks, but Shireen shakes her head because he doesn’t get it, not yet.

“I don’t think they’d leave any,” Rickon says quietly, holding out an empty duffel bag to Shireen. They look at each other, and for the first time there’s less guard there in his eyes, and she can see sympathy, however distant and ill-translated and vague. “If they used a key then they’d probably know to wear gloves, hmm?”

She stares up at him and nods miserably, nods again in perfect mimicry of Rickon and his silent communication when he suggests she pack a few things and stay the night with his sisters. The two Stark siblings talk as she packs clothes and toiletries, though they are quiet enough that she can only make out his low timbre and Arya’s higher cadence. It reminds her of her father’s funeral and the hushed tones, the careful words and sterile glances her way. The dirty clothes from her upturned hamper are strewn about the floor, and she nudges them out of her way a few times before giving up and treading on them like sad sorry carpeting.

Gendry offers last minute use of his own apartment in case she wants to stay with family, but he lives in a studio and knows it’s futile, anyway. They part with a bear hug that lifts her off her feet and squeezes the breath from her lungs, part with a promise from him to visit her tomorrow after his shift. He’s quick to kiss Arya before they leave so she can drive him home, though that small sweet gesture of affection does make Shireen smile, but when he’s gone she starts shivering again, and though she’s got pretty good reason to trust the hands into which she’s deposited herself, it suddenly feels very, very lonely, and very, very scary.

“Come on, let’s go,” Rickon murmurs, wordlessly sliding the strap of her duffel bag off her shoulder as he slings it across his body. He stands by her side as she locks the door, walks by her side as they head back down the drive, is an ever-aware glance up to where Mrs. Celtigar stands in the upstairs window, arms akimbo as she watches them leave. Shireen waves and after a few seconds the old woman waves back.

“I hope she’ll be okay,” Shireen whispers, making him snort.

“She almost took my head off with that mug, she’ll be just fine,” he mutters with a shake of his head. “And then she had the nerve to almost charge me for tearing up her flagstone. The damned thing was already loose,” he says, words teetering on the edge of churlish.

Shireen drops her keys twice when they get to the car, fingers a wobble and fumble as she flips through them looking for her car key. He’s at her side once more by the time she’s found the key with the thick black plastic fob.

“You’re shaking like a leaf, Shireen. Do you want me to drive? It’s not a problem, really,” He’s got his hand in a grip on the strap of her bag that cuts diagonally across his chest, is looking at her openly. No lies here, no falseness. Moody broody bitchy guy stuff, maybe. Something darker, too; but ultimately at the end of the day, at the end of _this_ shitty, shitty day, there is also something to trust.

“Okay, sure,” she says, and he nods, immediately turns on his heel in so sharp a fashion she sees the military in him rise up for that flare of a moment. He opens the passenger door for her, uses the time it takes her to walk around the car to toss her bag in the back seat. He adjusts the driver’s side seat when he gets in, scooting it all the way back so his knees aren’t jammed up against the dash, and they buckle their seatbelts in unison before it dawns on her.

“Oh, wait, do you um, can you drive stick?” she says, making him freeze.

After several beats Rickon unfreezes, resting back in the seat as he laughs, and this time it’s full of humor, an eyes-closed belly laugh that makes him tip his head back. And then she remembers his being in the army, knows he was overseas, imagines him driving big monster trucks or tanks or whatever like Mad Max in the desert.

“I can drive a lot of things,” he says, starting the car and backing it down the drive, his arm braced against the back of her seat as he twists to look behind him. His eyes flick to her for a moment, and it’s so different, the way his face looks when he grins, and she finds herself grinning back. “And yes, I can drive stick.”

It’s another quiet drive though this time it’s far less uncomfortable aside from the bizarre sensation of being in the passenger seat instead of behind the wheel, aside from having this stranger drive her car to some house she’s never seen. They head down 6th Street past the university campus and the enormous stadium, and the only break in the silence is when he calls his brother Bran to remind him to let his dog outside tonight and tomorrow morning. Shireen frowns.

“Why won’t you see your dog?” she asks.

He pulls up in front of an old Victorian style house, white with bright blue trim, its walkway flanked with pomegranate trees and oleander, a Spanish bayonet arcing dangerously over the tipsy lean of the mailbox.  Rickon shuts off her car and offers her the keys back, a metallic heap in the palm of his hand that she scoops up with the curling in of her fingers. His skin is just as cool as his gaze when it lifts from her hand to her eyes.

“Arya and I discussed it. I really don’t sleep at night so I get night shift. I’ll be here ‘til morning,” he says as he opens the car door and steps out. She knows now that when she reaches back for her purse and bag he’ll be at her side with the door open, and sure enough there’s the click of the door and the tall man standing watch as she steps out of the car. “Welcome home, I guess,” Rickon says.

“I don’t have a home anymore,” she says.

They stand there in the street, Rickon gazing to his right as Shireen gazes to hers. Finally they look back to one another, and he nods with a small smile, sad and brittle like hers are these days.

“Yeah, me neither,” he says.

 


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/121971041123/a-world-alone-chapter-4)
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> [Picset for Wylla!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122468268883/bex-morealli-a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for)

“Here,” Wylla says, swiping her index across the edge of her sandwich, gathering up a hunk of cream cheese, and he reflexively opens his mouth to suck it off the pad of her finger when she holds it in front of his face. “They always put too much on this sandwich.”

“Then why do you always order it?” Rickon asks, letting the taste of cream cheese mingle in with the flavors of his Rueben. He drains the rest of his soda, grabs Wylla’s Bloody Mary to chase down the bite of his sandwich, and his eyes widen only slightly at the amount of horseradish she requested in it.

“I like it, just not with so  _much_ ,” Wylla says, adjusting her sandwich in a more orderly fashion before tearing into what’s left of it. “Besides,” she says mid-chew like a trucker, the way he always loved way back when. “I’ve got you to help me, don’t I?”

Rickon shrugs, can’t help but chuckle because he’s been helping her finish her sandwiches here since they started making out junior year of high school.

They are sitting on the same side of a booth inside Bison Witches Bar and Deli on 4th Avenue close to downtown, the messes of their sandwiches corralled onto colored plastic trays over which they’ve spread their squares of wax paper. The place is almost empty since the college kids are gone for the summer, the radio is playing some sort of mellow hippie music, and he’s happy for the peace. It’s the color of heat in here, late afternoon sunlight a bounce off of red painted walls and the liquor bottles that fill the shelves behind the bar, the brown vinyl of the booths, the tanned legs of the California girls sitting at the bar taking Jell-O shots while they try not to gag.

His sense of humor gets the best of him when one of them nearly throws up in her napkin and he laughs so hard he begins to cough on the pepper of Wylla’s cocktail. She laughs at him, his old high school sweetheart, thumping his back with her palm as he tries to regain composure. His eyes water and his throat burns but he can’t stop laughing, a wheezing thing that sputters to silence into his fist.

“Serves him right, jerk,” one of the girls mutters from the bar, and he’s wiping at his mouth with a wad of paper napkins, is half inclined to agree with her when Wylla speaks up.

“Hey, honey, he fought for our country, okay? Show a little respect,” she snaps, and he sighs, hides his face from them with the cupped hand he now rests his forehead in.

“Pipe down, for chrissakes, you  _know_  how much I hate that shit,” he says, clearing his throat in an attempt to dislodge the pepper and horseradish that coats it. He ignores the girls at the bar now, even their tanned legs, but can still hear the mutterings of discontent over her outburst.

“You shouldn’t hate it, you should be proud of it. You served for like a fifth of your life, and that’s absolutely something to be proud of. I don’t care what happened there,” she says, her warm arm a snake and slide across his shoulders, her ever-present clatter of bangles a snag on his t-shirt.

 Three months he’s been back and she’s dropped a dozen of these hints, these pokes and prods that niggle and itch and squirm under his skin, and even now he has to tamp down the urge to shudder and shake her arm off of him. But he has to hand it to her for never stepping past that, no matter how her eyes search his for answers he has no intention of giving her. It’s like asking to dig up a dead body and crack it open, only to find that all the vital organs still pump blood.

Rickon mutters and hunches his shoulders up as he devours the rest of his sandwich, knocks the jeans of his knee against the bare skin of hers, which earns him the weight of one of her legs across his lap. It’s a weight he’s known for years, a weight he’s comfortable with. It’s the weight of bad SAT scores and sneaking out his window at three am, the weight of familiarity, and he rests his hand on her thigh, the weight of them both. It’s heavy.

“You gonna finish that, or what?” he says, nodding his head towards the crust of her sandwich, and he grins when she shoves the tray towards him. He’s hungry today, having stayed up all night watching over a dark and silent house, first in the living room and then the backyard, sitting on the trunk of Shireen’s car and then the porch steps before finally dozing off on the couch around 7am. Arya drove him home where he fell asleep with his arm slung over Shaggy, both of their heads sharing his pillow. He got a good amount of sleep, for him, but not enough, and he needs food to cover the rest of his depleted energy.

“You already know  _you_  are,” she says, and he bites her thumb when she shoves the rest of her food in his mouth.

He’s still chewing the remnants of her turkey sandwich, tipping his head away from her fingers that pretend to try and steal it from his mouth, and he bats her away with a halfhearted block that captures her wrist. Wylla laughs, tosses her head back so the sunlight hits her bleach-blonde-green hair like she’s a mermaid in a tank full of summer. He’s grinning with a mouthful of food with his hand tucked between her thighs when his attention is grabbed by someone throwing a handful of cocktail straws at him.

Rickon tosses Wylla’s wrist to her lap, is about to leap to his feet when he sees Arya laughing at the bar, Shireen standing in silence beside her. The black haired woman is wide eyes and solemn mouth, and she’s watching him like she might watch a creature at the zoo. But here he is with his mouth full and his body hunkered over his food like it’s the first meal he’s ever been seated for.

Not a good moment, for the second day on the job.

“Shit,” he says, swallowing down a half-chewed mouthful of sandwich, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as he sits up straight. He knocks Wylla’s leg off his lap with a nudge, tries to drink from his empty glass like an idiot before he finally chucks some ice into his mouth like he means it.

“Hey Wylls, long time no see,” Arya says.

His sister is in shorts and a Ramones t-shirt, her tangle of hair tied up in a messy bun and her feet in a pair of chucks that have seen better days. He remembers what she told Shireen about fitting in when it comes to Tucson, and he thinks she’s done well. Shireen, however, could be the example better fitted for a man in black. She’s in a trim sundress he could only describe, with his limited knowledge, as polite. It’s dark maybe because she’s in mourning, black like her hair with sprays of orange flowers, cool and removed like the way her eyes leave his to glance around the place. Her hands are clasped and they make him think of prayers at a funeral.

“Likewise, Arry,” Wylla says, hauling herself over Rickon’s body, her ass a single bounce in his lap before she stands in the narrow walkway between the booths and the bar, and he is still sitting there wiping his mouth when his sister and his old girlfriend hug.

“You guys having fun? We’re just here for some food before we go back home,” Arya says, hitching a leg up on one of the bar stools next to the California girls, and when the bartender turns away she pops a maraschino cherry in her mouth.

“Yeah, we’ve just finished. You have plans later? Maybe we could go shoot pool over at Danny’s or something,” Wylla says, her grin a ricochet between Arya and Rickon.

Rickon wipes his hands on another wad of napkins as he looks at Shireen. It’s a beat before she looks back at him, eyes a lift from the floor to his, and the shared look is the crack of a whip.  _I don’t have a home anymore,_  he hears in her voice, all little girl lost standing in a dark street, though she put on a brave face like the one she’s wearing now. A brave little lie wrapped up in a sundress.

“I’ve got to work tonight,” he says, watching the slight lift of Shireen’s eyebrows as she gazes down at her hands.

Wylla looks back at him over her shoulder before finally looking at Shireen, her finger pointing towards her as she says  _Ahh._

“So this is Ric’s new boss, huh? Right on, I’m Wylla Manderly,” she says, leaning forward  with her hand outstretched in frayed jeans shorts and a tank top with no bra, the trident tattoo on her hamstring stretching with the movement. They’re as different as they can be; dyed hair and rainbow colors of ink, slouched posture and two dozen bracelets shaking the hand of tidy bangs and pink lip gloss, shoulders back and an amber pendant hanging on a silver chain.

“Shireen Baratheon,” she says with a small smile, and they chat briefly about nothing, the heat and the upcoming monsoon season, which sandwich here is Shireen’s favorite, and Rickon lets loose a nod of approval when Shireen tells her it’s a Rueben.

“Anyways, nice to see you again, Wylla. We should go for drinks one of these Sundays. That Bloody of yours looks amazing. Ric, make sure to come over at like seven tonight, I told Gendry we’d go grab a movie.”

“Oh, um, actually, Rickon said he’d get a friend of his to help me pack up some of my stuff,” Shireen says, her eyes a drift to him.

“Yep,” he says with a nod, and she nods back with a smile and an exhale. “Sandor’s meeting us there in a couple of hours.”

“Sandor? That big guy you brought to our place that one time?” Arya grins, her eyes a keen squint as she studies him, and when he nods she claps her hands once. “Oh wow, this is going to be hilarious. I’m telling Gendry we’re going to help you guys. Sansa has the  _hots_  for that guy,” she says to Shireen when she looks confused.

When the bartender sets a plastic sack with two Styrofoam containers she grabs it, slings the handles onto her arm like Wylla’s bracelets, waves goodbye as she links her free arm with Shireen’s. Rickon watches the two of them head down the avenue through the front window, one a riot, one the eye of a storm.

“So that’s the rich girl, huh,” Wylla says, still standing by the booth as she sucks down the rest of her drink through her straw. “She’s pretty.”

“Don’t be bitchy, now,” he says, piling their garbage on his tray before he stacks them and stands beside her. She’s taller than Shireen, he realizes, when she gives his shoulder a nip and a kiss.

“Oh, calm down, I’m not, seriously. Her scars make her seem like less of a snob. They’re kinda badass, honestly,” she says, sticking her drink’s stalk of celery in her mouth like a cigar as she hip-sways her way to the door. Rickon smiles as he watches the rhythm of her.

“Yeah, they are.”

 

Shireen is a murmur of surprise when Rickon pulls up her driveway in his little Toyota pickup truck, if only because of who climbs out of the passenger side. He is tall and broad, so much so that Rickon is nearly dwarfed beside him though the latter clearly doesn’t skip workouts. Their shoulders move in unison as they fall into a matching stride, both wearing dirty, paint-and-oil-spattered jeans, though that’s about where the similarities end. This Sandor guy is not only bulk and brawn but is older, much older than Rickon, with salt and pepper scruff and that carriage of self that comes not from bravado or swagger but from years of experience.  Shireen is amused when Sansa lets loose a breath from her side where she stands in a pair of capri yoga pants and a racerback top, looking like a supermodel for workout gear.

“Jesus, he really came,” she whispers.

Shireen glances up at the redhead in time to see her drag her ponytail over her shoulder before she spins on the heel of a sneaker and heads back towards the guesthouse where Arya and Gendry can be heard sweeping up debris and teasing one another.

Sansa’s sudden departure is why she’s standing alone as they approach and she’s feeling awkward for it, like some sorry welcome party of one here in the afternoon sunshine that dapples the red brick driveway and makes the back of her neck slick with sweat. Shireen wishes she had left with Sansa now because she feels like some overeager puppy no matter how much she reminds herself that she is hostess here and that greeting guests is her duty. The two men stop a few feet away from her, ample space for her to fully regard the scars that mar the entire left side of Sandor’s face once he lifts his head to look at her. They’re gruesome to her but only because they are clearly burns, and the imagined pain sends a cringe up her spine. But there is also relief here, because if ever she’d have a kindred spirit when it comes to this sort of shit, it would be this guy. She grins when his eyebrows lift, nods when his eyes widen in surprise.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he says when he looks up from her scarred cheek, voice a deep yawn of dark space, a rumble of an old truck engine. He’d be handsome if it weren’t for the scars and that brittle-chip-defensive look that doesn’t quite leave his expression, but then maybe she’d be pretty without those things too. She decides she likes him as he is.

“Hey, Damned, I’m Shireen,” she says, holding out her hand, and after a narrow-eyed squint Sandor lifts his hand, engulfing hers when they shake.

“Smart-Ass suits you more,” he says, stepping past her towards the guesthouse, and she’s giggling over the exchange as she watches him pause briefly at the gate, a bug stuck in amber at the sight of Sansa poking her head out of the doorway. Sansa smiles, bites her lip, waves before stepping fully out onto the stoop. Finally he seems to master himself, and just as Rickon did last night he ignores the latch on the little gate and simply swings first one leg and then the other over it.

“I like that guy,” Shireen says, turning back to Rickon with a smile, because Sandor has no apology to him, whereas she seems to be built of _I’m Sorry_ half the time.

Rickon is staring at her with a mystified look on his face, his eyes a drop to her cheek. He looks up to Sandor’s retreating figure before looking back to her with a frown and a shake of his head. That’s when Shireen gets it and she laughs again, more subdued without a fellow scarface around, but it’s sincere just the same.

“I’m laughing because it’s a relief not to get those looks when you first meet someone. It’s nice to not have to talk about it or make excuses. It’s nice to just, you know, have it left alone and accepted for what it is, that’s all,” she says.

“Unlike what I did,” he says, making her look up where he’s doing his slow nod quiet thing again, shoulders up, always up as if fending off an invisible attack.

Shireen is about to apologize for making him feel bad, about to remind him that Sandor was only surprised because Rickon didn’t find her scars a big enough deal to mention, but then she remembers  _Your face_  and the smack of hurt it gave her. So she says nothing, only hums in agreement, murmurs a  _Thanks_  when he unlatches the gate and gestures her through, the stretch of his arm showing a large tear in his t-shirt and the long scratch of a welt down his ribs.

“What happened to you?” she says, nodding to his side when he looks at her with a confused frown that shines with sweat in the stifle of late day heat.He huffs a laugh, absentmindedly rubs at the scratch mark through the rip in his shirt.

“Oh, that. That’s love from Shaggy, right there. Some therapy dog, huh,” he says with another exhaled chuckle as he follows her through the gate, and she’s about to prod him for more information when she remembers his bitter-pill-swallow reaction when she thanked him for his service, and so she keeps her mouth shut, lets the comment hang and dissipate in the dry summer air.

“Anything you want to throw out for good, like that busted up coffee table, we can just toss out here. I’ll back my truck up and we can load it up afterwards,” he says as they come to a stand in the open doorway, pausing momentarily at the sight inside.

 It’s a cheerful cacophony of iPod music and banter, the sounds of cleaning and the bustle of so many people in such a small space. Rickon squeezes past her, his chest a brush against her shoulder, so he can walk inside and likely assess the situation, all guard dog prowl on the perimeter, and so she has the comforting view of five people helping her.  _Friends, I hope, one day at least,_  she thinks of the Starks and maybe even Sandor, and Shireen hugs herself in a happy moment of wishful thinking, because it would be more friends than she has ever had in her entire life. She smiles.

Gendry is doing some sort of bizarre dance move on a laughing Arya, his hips a thrust while he holds a roll of paper towels in one hand and lip syncs into a water bottle held in the other. Finally Arya grabs the roll of towels and chucks it across the room, flinging her arms up and over Gendry’s shoulders, pulling him down for a kiss and to shut him up in his boyish hilarity. It makes her happy, to see her cousin so lighthearted.  _And to think he hated having to go back to tending bar when got laid off from his desk job. At least it brought Arya into his life._

Her eyes flick from the living area to the kitchen where Sandor reaches up to pluck a vase from the top shelf in one of the cabinets, handing it down to a still breathless looking Sansa who is packing up her unbroken glassware. She can’t help but smile; everyone else is too busy and too locked away in their own worlds, Gendry tied up in Arya’s grey eyed grins, Rickon too bound up in his silence to notice it, but Shireen does. The way the man bows his head and turns just to the side to watch Sansa step away, pretending for all in the world like he is studying the floor. The way Sansa manages to flip her hair over her shoulder even in a ponytail, a whip of red look-at-me, and it works every single time.

She glances into her bedroom and there is Rickon sitting on his haunches, balanced on the balls of his feet as he picks up the dirty clothes still strewn all over the floor.

“Oh God, no,” she says, stepping over a few cardboard boxes she and Arya and Sansa put together earlier, edging past a stack of books to grab the skirt and tank top out of Rickon’s hands. “Please for the love of whatever, do  _not_  pick up my dirty clothes,” she says, righting her hamper and chucking the clothes back into it.

“They’re just clothes, Shireen,” he says, glancing to the corner where her bedside water glass has been knocked. He picks it up, looking at her with an amused look on his face. “But suit yourself. I can get Sandor and Gendry to help move your bed if you want. We can drive that over to Sansa and Arya’s before we start carting the broken shit out of here. Unless, I don’t know, do you want to stay here? Are you sure you feel safe?” he asks as he stands, and the question gives her pause.

Shireen  _loves_  this little house with its tucked away serenity and the fact that it’s on a street with no through traffic except for bicycles, loves getting to walk barefoot on soft grass every morning while she drinks her coffee. She  _used_  to love sleeping with her bedroom window open and her swamp cooler on all night, but the thought of doing so now chills her blood.  _They had a key,_  she thinks. Sleeping with everything locked up tight won’t do a damned bit of good, either.

“No, I don’t feel safe,” she says with a sigh, bending down to scoop up an armful of dirty clothes, and he’s still regarding her when she straightens, tosses them in the hamper and looks back at him.

“I’d stay here for as long as you need,” he says, haunted-eyed frown with a crease between his brows, flipping the water glass in his hands, up and over, up and over as he watches her.

“You can’t be here forever though, Rickon,” she says sadly.

“If you paid me forever, I could,” he says, and when she glances over at him he’s got one of those rare grins, like the one he wore in Bison Witches with that girl’s leg in his lap. She chuckles and shakes her head.

 “Whoever came in here, I think they’re going to come back, and if I’m here, I’m not sure what they’d do,” she says as she sits on the corner of the bed.

After a moment Rickon sits beside her, forearms resting on his knees as he stares at water glass in his hands. Shireen looks at her feet, turns them to the side, points her toes together, sighs and rests her chin in her hand and her elbow on her leg, bare to the thigh from the hitching up of her jogging shorts.

“What do you think they did it for? Why do you think they’ll be back?” he asks, turning his head to regard her. It’s dark in her bedroom, the sun trying in vain to slip past the fluffy boughs of oleander just outside her window, and it’s cool and muted, subdued and still.

“I think,” she says with an exhale after a few moments, “I think they’re looking for extra copies of the will. Mel ripped up the one Davos let her see, and he told her it wasn’t the only one. They destroyed my laptop, probably in case I had a copy. I assume that’s why they broke everything else, too, trying to find hard copies in the pages of books or behind framed photos or whatever.

“But,” she says slowly, putting it together as she talks, “I had my purse with me, and a backpack for hiking when I was up on the mountain with Gendry. I’m sure they’ll want my purse. So, yeah, I think they’ll be back. I’m surprised they haven’t come now. Hell,” she says with a bitter sort of laugh. “Maybe they’ve done drive-bys and the only reason they haven’t come barging in is because they saw the cars out front.” She’s about to cry, her breath hitching higher and drier with each sentence she spits out, when she feels the his weight shift on the bed, feels the weight of his hand on her shoulder blade, his thumb a brush against the spaghetti strap of her tank top.

“You’re pretty damn smart, huh,” he says, and once her breathing slows down and she’s mastered herself, Rickon’s hand drifts off her back, leaving behind a blank space of cool. “You’re right. They’ll want to check out your other stuff too. We have to keep an eye out for any muggers, I guess,” he says, musing on it and chewing on it. “And hey, if they’re driving by, then fuck ‘em. That’s what we’re here for, Shireen, that’s our job.”

“Yeah?” she says, turning to look at him, and it’s maybe the most open he’s been, both with his words and his expression. He’s not a liar but he’s not a giver either, certainly not a talker. “But it’s not really your job, though. You’re just covering for Robb,” she says, and here he snorts.

“It was given to me so I’m going to take it seriously. A Ran- the branch of army I was in, we don’t take shit lightly. This isn’t a game, it’s serious, and so when I tell you it’s _my_ job, Shireen, it’s _my_ job and I’m going to _do_ it, okay?”

They sit there gazing at each other in the muted muzzy light, fuzzed out with dark greys on the edges and in the corners of her overturned bedroom, the occasional hot breeze outside making oleander shadows dance and bob on the wall opposite her window. The swamp cooler is that familiar hum and rattle, a great tin-bellied beast lurking in the ducts that used to scare her and now only lulls her to sleep. If it weren’t for the mess everywhere it would be nice and comforting in here, it would still be a space she could call her own. But _he’s_ here, and it makes it feel less horrifying, somehow.  _Maybe it’s that taciturn part of him that makes it feel that way,_  she thinks, because at least he’s consistent. Shireen smiles, and to her happy surprise he smiles back, a real one that touches his eyes and makes them crease in the corners.

“Thanks,” she says.

He’s mid-shrug, half slipped into his uncomfortable boy posture when there is the thunderous, toe-curling smash of broken glass and the squeal of splintering wood, the sound of a girl’s shriek and a man’s barking laugh. Rickon freezes, blinks once and then several more times before he squeezes his eyes shut, dropping his head so his chin is tucked against his throat. It is as if a switch is flipped, watching him pull into himself like the surf at low tide, watching something take him over so abruptly. _Like quicksand,_ she thinks. There is another hideous crash that makes her crane her neck to try and look out her bedroom door, and Shireen realizes it’s probably her ruined glass-top coffee table being tossed to the flagstone outside her front door. Someone changes the music to punk rock and turns it up over the sounds of demolition, and she can hear Gendry shouting over the racket, can hear Arya laughing while someone takes what sounds like a mallet to a piece of wood.

And that’s when the glass in Rickon’s hands shatters.

 

Noise is everywhere, layer upon layer of it, the swamp cooler and the music, the talking and then the tearing apart of something that was meant to be kept together. More music, loud laughter and shouting, more crashes, more booms and chatter, another explosion and the racket of gunfire and the piercing pain of shrapnel in his hand that he never remembered before.

“Oh fuck, get out,” he says under his breath, knowing it’s too late, that even if Wex crawls to the other truck he’ll never make it. “Get out, get out, get out,” he says over and over, and he squeezes his hand, half expecting to feel the stock of an M16, but instead all he feels is that shrapnel bite in his palm.

“I’m sorry, Rickon, I don’t underst- I’ll tell them to stop,” a woman says, and he _knows_ that voice, not lilting but lower, dark and smooth like a river stone. The seat of the truck shifts to his left and – _This is a bed, not a truck –_ there’s another woman’s voice added to the raucous.

 _Osha,_ he thinks with despair, unclenching his fists to hold his head in his hands despite the pain in his right palm, to curl up in on himself even though he knows this is where he leaps out, this is where he—

“Open your eyes, Rickon,” someone says, another familiar voice, not a river stone unless it’s two of them being ground to dust. “Open your eyes, goddammit, and look at me.”

Rickon follows orders, and it’s a half burned face two feet from his, the debris of an explosion all over the ground – _It’s a floor, it’s a floor –_ discarded like parts of a car scattered and blown apart.

“Oh fuck,” he moans, trying to close his eyes once more. He thinks he might throw up.

“Come on Ric, open your eyes and breathe in. Breathe out. Shireen, give me something – no, not a fuckin’- there, look. There, that thing. I don’t care what it is, just give it to me,” says the low voice. “All right, give me that hand,” the voice says, and _Oh, it’s Sandor,_ he thinks.

Someone pulls his left hand from his head, and there is the soft slide of silk against the palm of his uninjured hand. _I don’t remember being hurt like this,_ he thinks, frowning as he opens his eyes to look first at his bloody right hand and then at his left, which is full of something.

“Describe it to me, and don’t close your eyes again, okay? Tell me every single detail about that thing,” Sandor says, and Rickon can see him on the outskirts of his vision, and the older man does not move, not even to stand out of his squat right here in Rickon’s face.

“It’s, it’s light blue. No, light purple. It’s a blue-purple, I think, I don’t know, it’s so fucking dark in here,” he says. “It’s um, it’s soft. Silky, and there’s uh, fuck, there’s lace stuff on it, trim I think? It’s white, on the edge here,” he says, using both hands to pull open the fabric, to stare down at it and think only of this object. Rickon’s eyelids droop half mast, and he sighs, drops his head just as he brings the silk to his face, buries his nose in it and inhales. “It smells like soap. Perfume. Something sweet. It smells like a woman,” he says, keeping the scent inside him for as long as he can. The sights and sounds in his head begin to ebb, ebb, ebb.

“All right, good. What do you think it is? Tell me about its function, and stop holding your breath. Breathe, in and out.” 

Rickon blinks, tries to obey the command and complete the mission. _It’s_ my _job and I’m going to_ do _it,_ he thinks, and that reminds him, he’s on the job right now, he can’t be fucking around with whatever this is. _What’s my job?_

“It’s a nightgown,” he says, swallowing a lump of nausea as he finds a thin strap of silk, holding it up with a forefinger as he stares at it. It dangles and turns slowly in the breeze from the evaporative cooler, long and pale and lightweight, edges of lace that felt like a soft scratch between his fingertips. Rickon nods decisively. “Yeah,” he says, with a gust of relief. “Yeah, it’s a nightgown. You sleep in it,” he says, feeling like he has won a marathon, has come in first place in the race of saving himself. His shoulders slump, and he realizes that every muscle in his body was constricted, clenched tight likes jaws. He is exhausted all of a sudden.

“I don’t think _I_ sleep in it,” Sandor says with a grin curling his voice, one that makes Rickon cough out a sickly laugh.

“No, but I do,” says a river-stone voice, and he leaps to his feet all of a sudden at the sound of it, clenching the gown in his left fist as he looks up past Sandor who still sits on his haunches between him and the door where Shireen is standing, eyes wide, lower lip pinned between her teeth. When they look at each other she tries on a smile. It looks like it’s made of water.

“Jesus,” he says, breathing through his mouth, panting like he really did run a race. “Jesus Christ, Shireen, I’m sorry,” he says, shaking his head, his eyes watering like there is sand in them. _Sand was everywhere that day._ It’s all he can do to keep himself from sliding back into that memory.

“Honestly, it’s okay, don’t worry about it,” she says, stepping carefully into the room, picking her way through the wreckage – _No, it’s clothes, it’s her clothes –_ towards him. “Here, let me,” she says, and he holds out his left hand, her nightgown still fisted there, but she leans across his body, reaching between him and where Sandor now stands.

“Okay,” he says dumbly, staring down at her hands, those fine bones that protrude from the sides of her wrists. _Wrists. Connect the hands to the arms. Pale for a desert girl because she doesn’t go out much._ He looks up at her face, watches her study his injured hand. _Black hair, bangs. Blue eyes, black in this light. Eyes look and see and watch. Scars, road rash, probably an accident when she was a kid. I wonder how much they hurt._

Shireen tuts a breath, snaps him out of it.

“Come on,” she says, leading him gingerly by the hand. “I need tweezers to get this stuff out. Your sisters aren’t here right now and Gendry is all thumbs when it comes to the dainty things. Same with Sandor, I reckon. No offense,” she says lightly, and Rickon forces his gaze from her face to his friend’s.

“None taken, girly,” he says. “I’ll go wait for Sansa. And Arya,” he says, turning to leave the room.

Rickon stares bemusedly at him as he is tugged gently towards the back of the bedroom. He turns around to find himself being led into a bathroom, terra cotta tile on the floor warmed up like butterscotch when she flips on the light. He winces, blinks away the bright until his eyes adjust, and she pulls him like a puppy into the room, pushes on his shoulders until he sits on the closed lid of the toilet.

“You’ve got glass in your hand in a few places. I’m going to take them out and then you’re going to wash your hands, and then I’m going to put some band-aids on you, okay?”

“Okay,” he says.

She’s standing between him and the sink, the flared legs of her shorts almost brushing his upper arm as she pokes around in her medicine cabinet. His mouth has a metallic taste to it and it reminds him of when Sansa used to get migraines in high school, how she said after she’d sleep it off it always felt like she had metal in her mouth the whole time. He smacks his lips, feels about as sturdy as a wet sheet, glances around the little room to distract himself. _Wind chimes outside the window for music. Candle in the windowsill for, for, for ambience. Ambience?_ He is inwardly relieved to see that at least this room was mostly left alone, that the only aftermath of the break-in here is at the bottom of her tub, a pile of towels and several bottles of shampoo and whatever else women use to bathe themselves.

“All right now, give me your hand,” she says, voice a low hum like that swamp cooler, and that’s when he realizes it’s quiet again _._ There’s no sound of talking, no music, no crashing or rending or hammering. “This might hurt,” she says.

Rickon laughs. It sounds like the ribbon from a cassette tape unraveling. “I’ve had worse,” he says, instantly regretting it when she pokes in the tweezers, snares a piece of glass and pulls it out. She drops it in the sink, and he hears it clatter against the porcelain basin.

 “So,” she says quietly after a few more digs and removals, “I’m going to assume that when you first saw my face it made you think of Sandor. And I’m going to assume that you two fought overseas together, and that whatever happened to him happened to you, too,” she says, punctuating her sentence with another drop of glass shard to the sink. “How am I doing so far?”

“Close,” he says, and he wants to shut his eyes, but instead he watches her perform her little mini-surgery. She’s more than just clever, he realizes. She’s steady hand and a no nonsense attitude that calms him down, even now. He keeps his eyes open, he breathes in and he breathes out. “I did think of Sandor, but he wasn’t with me, even though he- I mean, it was years ago for him. But still, it’s, you know, it’s war,” he says. “Fuck war.”

“I’ll drink to that,” she murmurs, setting down the tweezers and pulling his hand under a sudden burst of cold water from the faucet.

He distracts himself from the pain by squeezing the silk in his left hand, burying his fingers in it. She pats his hand dry before dabbing Neosporin on his several cuts and sticking waterproof Band-aids over all of them. Two of the Band-aids have hearts on them, and it makes him smile until he finally registers something that was said fifteen minutes earlier.

“Where did my sisters go?” he asks, brave enough for eye contact now, and when she’s done with the last Band-aid she frees his hand and leans against the wall across from the toilet.

“Getting Shaggydog,” she says simply, hugging herself as her gaze drops to her sneakers.

“How did- I mean, why? How’d they know?” He looks down, flexing his right hand gingerly. The Band-aids stick relatively well but he knows not to use it much, or else all of her work will come peeling away.

“I told them to,” she says, smiling when he looks at her with what Wylla calls his _What the Fuck_ expression. “You mentioned earlier that he’s your therapy dog. I thought- I figured you need him around you now.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he murmurs as he stands up, and she smirks as he gazes down at her with the shake of his head.

“That’s the second time a man’s said that to me today. I wonder what it means,” she says.

“It might mean that you get underestimated a lot,” he says, regarding this slip of a woman, dainty-faced with thin fingers and small hands, quick-witted and sharp if she has to be. “Thanks, Shireen. I just uh, I’m sorry you had to see that.”

She shakes her head.

“It’s okay, Rickon. Everybody’s got them,” she says, and he frowns at her as they hear the creak of the wrought iron gate out front, as they hear the claw and whine of a big dog at the front door.

“Got what,” he asks, follows her as she walks out of the bathroom, watches the weeping willow breeze of her as she walks away from him, hears the swish of her running shorts as they rub together.

“Demons,” she says.

He wants to answer her, to apologize and to say thank you about a dozen more times, but then she’s opening the front door and Shaggy is a black-furred burst on four legs, and he’s just made it out of her bedroom in time to crouch down and catch his dog, and it’s then that he realizes he’s still clutching her nightgown in his hand. _Light blue-purple. Soft, silky, lace on the edge. The smell of a woman. A nightgown to sleep in._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So what Sandor does with Rickon is a technique called grounding, where a person going through a PSTD flashback is helped to focus on an object and to describe it. Opening one's eyes and studying it help to keep the person in the present. I've done Internet research on it and have reached out to a couple of veteran friends of mine, but didn't get a response in time for my hasty posting. If anyone has anything they'd like to suggest I am absolutely open to it.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122554944018/a-world-alone-chapter-5)
> 
> [Davos picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/122729958213/bex-morealli-a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for)

Sansa and Arya live in an old Victorian house that may or may not have been a brothel at the turn of the century, and Arya’s downstairs bedroom boasts its own bathroom, complete with claw foot tub original to the house.  _I call it my hooker tub,_  she tells Shireen one morning, says with the next breath to use it anytime she wants. The next time she has to shave her legs she does so with the magenta glow of bougainvillea just outside the closed window, the butter colored roman shade drawn halfway to block out some of the persistent sun. It’s the sound of water lapping the cast iron sides of the tub, the drip of suds from her hand and the razor as she runs the latter from ankle to calf, the trill of golden finches and low croon of mourning doves, the indignant squeak of hummingbirds. It’s the happy distraction of a job that requires her full attention as she runs her hand up her soap-slick shin, inspecting for any stray hairs she might have missed before moving on to another area of her leg.

The peace is short lived, though the house is quiet today with only one Stark sister present and accounted for. When she emerges from Arya'sbroom, Sansa is sitting with her legs crossed at the little breakfast table on the other side of the kitchen counter, her foot bobbing to whatever song she’s listening to in her earbuds as she works on her laptop and sips iced tea.

“Feeling any better?” Sansa asks, giving the keyboard a final flutter of her fingertips before pulling out her earbuds and smiling sweetly to Shireen. Her long hair is twisted up in a crown braid and she’s in a faded old tie-dyed maxi dress that makes her look like a meadow sprite, even though not ten seconds ago she was likely hours-deep in excel spreadsheets and billing issues. “Even on a hot day, sometimes a bath is what you need. Did you use the lavender oil on the shelf behind the tub?”

“I did, actually, it was wonderful, thank you. And, I don’t know, I guess I feel better. I feel refreshed, but still full of dread,” Shireen says with a sigh, looks down at her damp feet that look all the paler since the western side of the house still boasts the cool cloak of shade. She shifts her weight, hears the pine floorboards creak.

“I don’t blame you. You sure you want to go alone? I mean, I know we haven’t known each other long, but I consider you a friend. People need friends during a time like this,” Sansa says, slapping the laptop shut and pushing it to the center of the table.

Shireen smiles at the sentiment. She’s lived under this roof for two weeks now, has become so saturated with Sansa’s affable smiles, with elbow-to-the-ribs jokes from Arya and that steady brooding presence of Rickon’s that it all seems just this close to normal. Shireen knows she pays them, knows this is their job, but it isn’t part of the job description, sitting on Sansa’s bed late at night while the three of them discuss careers and school, owning versus renting, deep dark loss and tragedy and heartbreak. It isn’t part of the job description when Rickon pulls up outside and hands over a bag of chile relleno tacos from Los Betos, or a greasy bag of Pat’s burgers and fries. She isn’t paying them money for when his nod-or-mutter conversation skills slowly relax and unwind while they watch old episodes of Third Rock from the Sun on Netflix because they are both bored and they neither of them can sleep anymore, it seems. She isn’t paying for their kindness and their friendship; they are giving them to her for free, and she knows this.

“It’ll be okay. Davos will be there, and Edric is going to take me out afterwards for a drink. When I’m alone, I feel it, the fear and the worry, but it’s all right for today. Davos has been there for me since I was a kid, and I’ve known Edric since college. They’ll support me,” she says.

 “So, Edric, huh,” Sansa says. “Is this the guy you mentioned the other night? The on-again-off-again-guy?”

“That’s the one,” she says with a nod as she turns to climb the wrought iron staircase to the loft upstairs where she’s been sleeping. ‘On again’ was a month ago, right before everything fell apart, but given their history, she shouldn’t be surprised that he stepped back, not really. They’ve done this dance for years now, since his senior year when she was a sophomore. Shy Edric Dayne and scarred Shireen Baratheon, the two quiet mice in the backs of lecture halls or with their heads bent together in the library on Saturday nights.

She drops the towel the moment her feet touch the carpeting; the loft has its own little A/C unit up here but heat rises, and the air is thick up here. Shireen paces back and forth from this box and that, stands in her underwear as she tries to figure out where particular pieces of clothing are, and she settles on a jersey dress that lets her skin breathe in this heat, figures she will change again this afternoon before her meeting. She’s about to trot back downstairs when her phone chimes.

**Davos:** Just got into the office. Computers have been completely erased. No more new Will.

**Shireen:** What does this mean?? Is she still coming to the meeting? She can’t dare show her face.

**Davos:** She wanted to bump up the meeting actually. Told her it is still for 3pm. I’m so sorry Shir.

**Shireen:** No flash drive? Nothing?

**Davos:** Stannis had one but it would be in the house. I’m sure she has combed through the place.

**Shireen:** The ripped copy! The one she tore up at dad’s funeral?

**Davos:** Doubt she’ll be bringing it with her, honey.

Davos’s offices are in an old house on Speedway close to 4th Avenue, looks from the street to be just another higher end residential property with whitewashed adobe and terra cotta roof tiles, brightly colored trim and well-watered landscaping out front. Shireen knows that the front door is just for looks now, that it’s walled in on the other side, though the plants in talavera pots flanking the sage green door make it look as cheerful and homey as ever. She is mad enough today, however, that charging through the wood and plaster and drywall seems highly plausible.

“Is she here yet?” she asks as she stalks in through the glass door in the rear of the building, the afternoon heat from his small asphalt parking lot in the back ushering her inside.

“No, not yet,” Davos says, and he is clearly as agitated and upset as Shireen is, his footfalls heavy as he emerges from his office, tossing a stack of files on the receptionists’ desk in the middle of the main room. “Coffee? Tea?”

“No thanks. So seriously, it’s all gone?” she asks following Davos as he strides into the conference room to the right of the front desk. It’s a long, narrow room, lit with natural light from the row of three northern facing windows, softened with a fern hanging in front of each of them.

“Everything’s gone. No sign of a break-in, either. I had three tech guys in here not even two hours ago. What’s worse is the copy of Stannis’s new will that I filed with the probate court has gone missing. The woman down there emailed me yesterday asking for another copy, and I came in at noon today to email another one, only to find that everything is gone. So many goddamned cases, and all the electronic files are wiped out. Thank God I still keep hard copies of those cases, but for yours, Shireen, I’m sorry. I don’t know what to do.”

Her head swims from the weight of his words, from how ruthless her stepmother is being, and her heart goes out to her friend for the troubles Mel is putting him through all in the name of money. Shireen leans against the edge of the elongated oval table, stares blanket down at the high gloss tiger’s eye color of it beneath her fingers as she sits down.

“Oh my God, I can’t believe she’s doing this to us,” she murmurs as he covers her hand with his. “She could have ruined your entire firm, Davos, this is insane.”

He sighs, pats the knuckles of her hand before straightening and pulling out a wheeled chair next to his at the head of the table where he himself sits once she takes her seat. The heat and melted-butter color of sunlight is muted and diffused from the thin white drapes that are drawn across the windows, and he looks older for it, more wrinkled and grey, and for some reason that angers her all the more, how this is taking its toll on him.

“I wouldn’t put it past her, Shir, I really, really wouldn’t,” he says with a sigh.

“Wouldn’t put what past whom,” says a silk-ribbon voice from behind them, and before Shireen can turn around Mel walks in, hips a slithering undulation in a dress better suited for a nightclub than a lawyer’s office. She uses the room like a catwalk, sitting all the way at the far end of the table, head to head with Davos.

“Before you clarify, I would hate to have to issue a charge of slander against my client,” says the man following closely on Mel’s heels. “Godry Farring, good to meet you,” he says, though it most certainly isn’t. He is oily-toned and glitter-eyed as he sits down, setting his attaché case on the conference table.

Her lawyer is a tall, broad man, looks more like a butcher or a dock worker than a lawyer, but Shireen supposes the profession can whisper its persuasions to all walks of men. He sits to Mel’s right and they are a mirror of Shireen and Davos, and it makes her think of chessboards, makes her wonder if anyone has played such a dangerous game as the one they’re playing now.

“I suppose it should come to no surprise that the Will Shireen and I showed you after Stannis’s funeral has completely disappeared,” Davos says, ignoring Godry’s introduction.

Shireen watches as he leans forward, forearms on the table and hands clasped. In contrast Mel leans away from the table, her hands resting on the armrests of her black office chair like a queen’s on a throne, and Shireen can see the brief bob of her milk white kneecap as she crosses her legs. It does not escape her attention either that Godry seems to notice it as well; his dark eyes are a downward flick to Mel’s legs.

“What Will? We never went over _anything_ that day. Why would I want to do such a morbid thing on the day of my husband’s funeral? Although I’m not surprised that  _you_  two would,” she says, eyebrows a judgmental lift.

“It was  _your_  idea,” Shireen says, her voice rising, her hands two fists in her lap. She feels her fingernails dig half-moons into the flesh of her palms and she quickly unclenches her hands, smoothes the cotton of her skirt over her thighs.

“You see? I told you about her, didn’t I,” Mel says, and her lawyer snorts, nods, looks derisively down the length of the table to Shireen.

“This is insane, you are  _insane,_ ” Shireen says, shaking her head with widened eyes. “Like, this is delusional. All three of us were  _there._  And then you pitched a fit, broke into my house and ruined all my stuff, and now you’ve come here and erased Davos’s hard drives,” she says.

“Wait a second,” Mel says, holding up a hand. “Are you accusing me of criminal behavior? Godry, if you would,” she says.

He immediately pulls out a pen and yellow legal pad from his soft leather attaché case, hunches his broad shoulders as he writes, and it looks so comical Shireen has to wonder if he really  _is_  a lawyer. She has a sudden wild, sick urge to laugh, always at the worst times, and she sucks in a breath to cover it up with some well chosen words.

“Shireen, please,” Davos murmurs, resting a hand on her shoulder.

“’Shireen, please’ indeed,” Mel says, disdain dripping like venom from her words. “These accusations are unbelievable,” she says to Godry, tone changing to one of wounded widow.

“Keep the insincerity and dishonesty out of this room, Melisandre,” Davos snaps. “Lie all you want to this lawyer of yours, but do not deign to lie to Shireen or to me, not when we all know better.”

“Using my full name, now, hmm? Are you pretending to be my father now, too? Telling me I’m in trouble? Well,” she says, leaning forward, fully immersed in the battle now, “blaming me for things I haven’t done, I can sue you for that, and I will if it suits me. As for you,” she says, turning her head like a serpent’s towards Shireen. “Tell me, did you report this break in? Or is it something you’re inventing now to piggy back on grandpa’s inability to properly use a computer?”

Godry snorts a laugh, head still bent over his notes. He is ill fitting suit and overhang forehead, looks as brutish as Mel does poisonous.

“Because let me tell you something, stepdaughter,” Mel says, dipping her hand into her lawyer’s briefcase, and she pulls out a file folder nearly identical to the one she ripped in half not so long ago. “Without a police report it’s not going to hold water, and will just look like you’re a greedy, wicked little shit trying to get her hands on all of her daddy’s money, even though she’s clearly being awarded her fair share. As for you, old man, I’m sure all the time you two spend together might looks suspicious to a judge.”

“What the hell are you implying?” Davos says, voice dangerously low, his jaw muscles a clench and release, clench and release. “She’s like a granddaughter to me.”

“You’re disgusting,” Shireen says, mouth downturned from the sour taste on her tongue. Despite the A/C running there is a sickly prickle of heat on the back of her neck, and she draws the length of her hair over her shoulder to give herself relief, to give her hands something to do besides strangling her stepmother.

“Oh, no, that’s not what I meant, though I do find it interesting that’s where the  _both_  of you went. What I mean is all of this fabrication the two of you have come up with. Two sad, bitter people concoct a plan where they try to steal money from a grieving widow,” she says, giving the folder a hard push so it slides towards them down the center of the table. Davos catches it before it flies off the surface to the floor.

“It doesn’t take much to see that that’s what is really happening. Especially since the  _real_  will is already so favorable to little miss princess over here,” she says, rising to her feet. “Now, before I have to listen to any more of this defamation of character, we’re going to leave. Do think about what I said, Shireen. I would  _hate_  for you to get yourself into trouble, trying to drag me down. I’ll walk myself out.”

Shireen and Davos stare at one another, brows knit together in mutual confusion, as Mel and Godry leave, the latter making some ill-timed and ill-received joke about billable hours on weekends. The air in the room is thick and uncomfortable, the tension left behind remaining and keeping them both still and silent until they hear the little bell on the front door chime, and then they both exhale. Davos rubs the spot above the bridge of his nose while Shireen slumps forward, resting her forehead on her folded forearms.

“What did she give you,” she asks, her voice a muffled echo in the enclosed space between her bowed body and the table.

“The old will, naturally,” he says. “Division of all assets. Shireen gets the condo in Key West, Mel gets the house. The money is divided essentially down the middle, though she does get both cars and the boat.”

“I don’t want cars or a fucking boat,” she says.

She may be warmer, kinder, more prone to hug than her father was, but she isn’t his daughter for nothing. These things are hers by rights, by her very father’s own wishes, yes, but there is also the fact that it is simply  _wrong_  for Mel to reap the benefit of her father’s hard, lifelong work.

“The investments are also split in half, though I do notice your father left you in charge of stocks that historically have been far more lucrative. And then there’s- ah,” he says. “Hmm.”

“What? What is it?” she says, sitting up like a shot. She knows that tone, all casual and light though it does a poor job of hiding the truth.

“In the case one of you should die, the other gets it all,” he says, lifting his eyes from the paper, gazing at her over the edge of his reading glasses. Shireen’s blood runs cold.

_I’ll kill her with my bare hands if I have to._

Rickon sits under Robb’s carport next to his brother, who no longer needs crutches to get around though he still can’t move any quicker than a hobble, watching as the eldest Stark sibling cleans one of his handguns. The high stinging smell of Hoppe’s fills the humid air around them, the stillness and heaviness both promising signs for a monsoon storm, though right now they’re a misery. He watches Robb handle the .45 with deftness that he knows he too possesses, with a comfortableness that is just below his skin, that sometimes itches to come back out. But for now he simply watches him, lets his mind drift as he thinks of purple-blue silk, the sounds of a woman’s shorts swishing together.

“You want any Kevlar? For you or for her?” Robb asks conversationally as he looks through the open stock of the gun, peering with one eye closed to see if any gunk remains.

He looks good for someone basically marooned on the island of his own home unless he can get a ride. The break is in the femur of his right leg, and it still pains him to maneuver it or use enough pressure to drive a car. But he’s in relatively high spirits, wears the scruff of a week old beard but also seems to be showering regularly. New girlfriends tend to have that effect.

“Nah. It was just the break in. I don’t think anything much more serious is going to happen. I feel bad for her though,” he lets slip, reaching down for one of two Coronas sweating side by side between his and Robb’s chair. He pauses a moment before swigging his beer, wonders how that just came to the surface and bubbled out.

“What, the dad thing?” Robb glances up at him with a flicker of hope, eagerness, the same sort Rickon sometimes sees in EB when it looks like Rickon is about to open up.

“Well, yeah, the dad thing,” he says after a moment. They’ve had a handful of conversations now over the past week or so, and he can hear her voice in his head, how sometimes it dampens on the edges when she talks about her dad, about the way Mel is screwing her over. “And the break in, the ransacking, all the shit that bitch is putting her through. All just for money. Fuck money, who gives a shit,” he says, because he’s watched the one true value everyone has get taken away with a single blast, because he dreams about it most nights.

“So it’s going okay, then? The job, I mean,” Robb says, apparently finding his cleaning job satisfactory. He puts the gun back together, wiping it a final time with his rag before slowly standing up to limp to the laundry sink in the rear of the carport next to his washing machine.

“Yeah, it’s fine. It’s boring when she’s- when everyone’s gone to sleep, but I’d be up anyways,” he says to his brother’s back as he washes the Hoppe’s from his hands.

“Well, good. I felt bad, being laid up with this stupid leg,” Robb says, drying the backs of his hands on the seat of his jeans, his palms on his thighs as he hobble-limps back to his seat, sitting gingerly, wincing despite his care. “I know it’s probably a bit soon for you, getting back into the same sort of work as before.”

He almost laughs, bitter and twisted like the rind of an orange, that Robb could think of what Rickon did and what Robb does as the same line of work. Being a soldier versus playing at one in Kevlar with a concealed weapon. But he’s listened to Alliser Thorne bitch too many times about the disparity to cling to it, anymore. Being fresh out of today’s therapy lesson helps too; Sandor spoke some today, long legs stretched towards the center of the circle, spoke about finally feeling free from some of his resentment, about not being so eaten up by anger anymore.

 _Soft with lace trim. Wind chimes outside the window. The flare of jogging shorts. Skin too pale for harsh desert sun._ Rickon sighs, not unhappily.

“Well,” he says finally, and he has to give it to Robb, for sitting there waiting patiently as Rickon lets himself float away on thoughts as he ponders his words. “I think it’s good, doing something, you know? Something to put my mind to. And I’m sleeping three hours at a time now, every time. I mean, hell, throw a nap in there somewhere and I’m right as rain,” he says, and the brothers grin at one another.

“Glad to hear it, man,” Robb says.

They sit and watch the clouds roll up from the south, fat things that pull themselves together to build castles out of thunderheads, their flat bottoms shaded in soot grey from the buildup of rain. The mailman comes and Robb waves, though the dogs across the street go nuts with their barking, and sweat slides down Rickon’s bottle of beer as steadily as it slides down his neck and into the collar of his t-shirt. The breezes blow hot if they blow at all, and eventually they head inside for the cool air, Rickon holding the backdoor open for his brother as Robb carefully lifts his broken leg up and over the threshold, pulling himself in with two grips to the door frame.

They’re playing old school Nintendo in the white-tile-cool of Robb’s front room, the blinds drawn against the sunshine leaving the room awash in dove grey calm. There’s the unlocking of the deadbolt and the twist of the doorknob, making Rickon’s gaze flick from the screen to the front door, stray-cat-wary, but then Dacey walks in, spare key a jingle on her keyring, and Rickon nods up at her when she says hello.

“Please tell me you’ve moved at least once from this sofa,” she says, brown hair a sweep to the side when she leans over to kiss Robb.

“I cleaned a gun and drank a beer outside,” he says, and both men laugh when Dacey rolls her eyes and says  _Oh for chrissakes._ “What? It wasn’t loaded, and I finished the beer  _after_  cleaning it.”

“Two points for thinking clearly, then,” she says, setting her purse down and wandering into the kitchen.

“Am I getting in the way of a date night? Robb needed me to pick up a few things at the store, that’s why I’m her- ah, fuck,” Rickon says as Luigi falls into a labyrinth pit.

“No, not at all. It’s not like he’s going to take me out dancing or anything. We were going to order some Thai food from Karuna’s, you want in on it?” she says, and he nods, offers to pick it up when she makes the call.

“Extra peanuts for me, Dace,” Robb says, sending his Mario flying over mushroom caps as he races through a level.

“Karuna’s is Grant and Campbell, right?” Rickon asks, tossing his controller to the coffee table after dying a second time, and he drags his phone out of his pocket when it buzzes with a text.

“Yeah, across from Bookman’s,” Dacey says, rummaging through a junk drawer until she finds the thin stack of takeout menus.

**Arya:** Talked to Shireen today?

Rickon frowns, swiping his finger across the screen to reply. Arya told him earlier today not to worry about being on duty tonight, but he assumed it was because she’d be with their client.

**Rickon:** No, should I have? What’s up

**Arya:** Nothing, she just went to see her stepmom at her lawyer’s today. Haven’t heard from her.

_Fuck,_  he thinks, sitting up from his slouch to type faster. He completely forgot that was today, it being a Saturday and all. Lawyers are for Mondays, for wearing suits and sitting up straight. Saturdays are for, well, what  _he’s_ doing right now. Rickon wonders if Shireen plays Nintendo.

**Rickon:** Hey, it’s Ric, are you all right? Arya told me you went to your meeting today

He stares at the screen of his phone.

“Everything okay?” Robb asks. “It’s your turn, Luigi.”

“Play my guy for me,” he says absently with a dismissive wave of the hand, watching his screen for the little bubble that shows she’s writing him back. Nothing. He goes back to Arya’s text to eat up the time and try to get some answers.

**Rickon:** Why aren’t you with her? I figured you guys had plans tonight so you were just hanging the whole day

**Arya:** She told me not to worry about it, that she’d be with Davos and later with this guy she’s dating Edric.

**Rickon:** FFS, Arya, we have a fucking job to do here, what’s the matter with you

**Arya:** Every job has days off, Rickon, calm down. This isn’t Iraq.

**Rickon:** Screw you too sis

Rickon tamps down his temper as he closes out of Arya’s text, pulling up Shireen’s as he waits for her response. He frowns, chews the inside of his lip as a few things process through his mind. She’s hired them for around the clock security, something he doesn’t take lightly regardless of whatever Arya says or thinks. Their client has just met with the woman who has threatened her life, and now she’s out alone.  _Not alone, with a boyfriend,_  he self-corrects, though he wonders how well this Edric guy can defend himself, let alone someone else. Let alone Shireen.

His phone buzzes.

**Shireen:** Drowning my sorrows. Mel 1 Shireen 0

**Rickon:** Where are you?

Wherever she may be, she either dropped her phone back in her purse and didn’t hear the text, or she ignored him, because he does not get a reply. Years of training and experience all tell him this is not something he can comfortably ignore or push aside. Men and women die from smaller oversights. He’s already on his feet, pacing the white tile of his brother’s front room, staring at the screen with a frown. He closes out of his messages and pulls up the app that he installed on his phone and Shireen’s, waits a moment for it to load before he can see on a map where she is.

“Hey uh, sorry, but something came up, don’t order me anything,” Rickon says, closing the app and sliding his phone back in his pocket. “Thanks for the beer, man, and for the offer, Dace,” he says, crossing the room to pick up his keys on the coffee able.

“Wylla jonesing for a night out, huh,” Robb says, holding the controller to his side as he presses a button repeatedly, as if changing his position can make Luigi jump higher.

“Something like that,” Rickon says, and he feels bad, using his girlfriend –  _whatever she is, whatever we are –_ as a lie, especially since it’s like pulling teeth, her getting him to go out anywhere anymore. “Talk to you later, man,” he says, and Robb pauses his game to return the high five and wrist-grab, to reach up and slap Rickon on the back when he turns to leave.

The sun finally sinks when he’s on the road, drives down the length of Broadway towards 4th Avenue where Shireen is with her date, and the relief of twilight and shadow is palpable, even inside the cool confines of his truck. Everything is heightened for him these days, all five senses, like he’s over-wired or too tightly strung. With the glare of the sun out of his eyes his shoulders relax, makes him breathe easier, helps him to focus more on the road.  _Drowning my sorrows,_  she said, He wonders what happened in the meeting, hopes those sorrows and their subsequent drowning don’t lead to carelessness or push her guard down too low to pull back up again if someone were to come after her.

Rickon steps on the gas.

He parks in the street across from Sky Bar, a corner bar partly open to the sidewalk and a long patio that offers telescope views after nightfall. She isn’t sitting out there, he can tell immediately from the sparse crowd sitting outdoors, most of them smoking, all of them sweating from the lingering sunset heat. He’s jogs across the Avenue, stopping just short of a girl on a moped cutting it too close, and when he’s on the sidewalk he lingers just outside the double wide doorway, scanning the scatter of patrons sitting at tables or on indoor patio furniture, finally letting his gaze settle on the long stretch of bar and the row of mostly empty barstools.

She’s there, facing the street and where Rickon now stands, her head tilted and scars resting in the palm of her hand as she talks to some blonde guy wearing a button down. Even from this distance she looks distraught, is sad doll eyes with her bangs a brush against her eyebrows, the bow of her mouth drawn down, heavy with heartache.

It’s too early for a bouncer at the door checking IDs, so he slips in and immediately walks towards the patio away from Shireen. He takes his time, pretending to text on his phone as he meanders to and fro outside so that he is a familiar sight on her periphery, so she won’t turn to look at him like she might if he just walked right in towards her. After a few minutes he walks back in, hands in his pockets and head down as he strides down the length of the bar towards the bathrooms. He takes a leak and washes his hands, splashes water on the back of his neck before heading back out towards her. It’s risky, but he orders a tonic with lime at the very far end of the bar nearest the stage in the back, studies the back of her head and the bland face of the man she’s with, this Edric guy who has a look of polite concern on his face.

Whatever they’re saying, it’s not animated. He’s seen her riled up before, has watched her and listened to her when she’s speaking with his sisters, and knows she talks with her hands. But she’s adrift here, is nothing much more than the downcast of her eyes when she stirs her drink, or the ruffling up of her bangs when she runs her fingers through them to readjust the way she holds her head in her hand. He pays for his drink, tucking the straw behind his index finger as he takes a long swallow of it, lets the cold sourness of it chill his mouth before he swallows.

He is momentarily alarmed when he sees a man’s hand on the back of Shireen’s head, has lowered his drink halfway back to the bar before he realizes it is Edric pulling her in for a kiss. There’s an odd twist in his stomach, and he’s not sure if it’s jealousy or loneliness, not sure if it’s guilt for staring so shamelessly. Rickon swallows another mouthful of tonic and lime, feels all of a sudden like a classic fool for comparing the intensity of a woman’s detail request to that of overseas duty, for letting the Ranger in him take control from the civilian.  _She’s allowed to go to a bar, she’s allowed to make out with her boyfriend,_  he thinks. _Jesus, you idiot._

They’re still locked together when he tosses a dollar on the bar and walks past them, risking the close proximity due to the relative distraction of Edric’s tongue on hers. He can’t help but glance down as he passes, in time to see Shireen pull away and turn from her date, elbows on the bar as she breaks off the kiss and shuts herself away. It is so familiar a move that it only takes him a second to realize it’s what he does with Wylla, the shutdown and push back, the rollover and fade away. Fundamental parts of him have changed, for the good or the bad, and he wonders if what’s happened to her has changed Shireen. The broken parts of him feel for her, that she is so broken inside too. He hopes she’s all right, and once more he wonders what happened in that meeting to make her look so cast to sea.

Rickon is halfway across the street, keys in his hands when his phone buzzes.

**Wylla:** Hey baby, lets’ go play pool at Danny’s

Rickon stares at the phone as he absently puts the key in his lock, turning it and getting into the dark cab of his truck, looks up through his dusty window into the bar, can see Shireen standing and putting her purse over her shoulder.

**Wylla:** Come on, Ric, I wanna go out! We never go out anymore

He sighs, slumping down in his truck when Shireen and Edric walk out of Sky Bar, the latter’s hand a light and polite press to the small of her back as they walk down the sidewalk. He watches them, watches as Shireen takes a single sidestep away from him, watches Edric’s hand slide off her back to hang limply in the dead space between them.

**Rickon:** Can’t, working. Sorry

 

It’s not until she’s back at Arya and Sansa’s house, quiet and dark and empty, before she realizes she missed a text from Rickon at the bar. It makes her smile through tears that haven’t quite yet fallen, and after she changes and washes her face, pours herself a glass of wine, she texts him back.

**Shireen:** Sorry I missed your text, I was having a drink on the Avenue. Home now safe and sound.

**Rickon:** Everything ok?

**Shireen:** Yeah. A little after party of one over here. Might get crazy though, there’s an unopened bag of chips here.

**Rickon:** My kind of party especially if there’s no people or music

**Shireen:** Loudest thing here is me slurping wine and eating chips. Come on over if you think you can handle it

She pulls down the bag of chips and hops up on the counter beside her glass of wine, watching lightning flash and flare and crack outside the kitchen window, counting inside her head to see how long it takes the thunder to follow up with its rumble. She wonders if monsoon storms affect him the way the whole coffee table incident did, the way he shut down and turned himself off, how he seemed to just, in the blink of an eye, reboot all wrong. _Poor Rickon,_ she thinks, popping a chip in her mouth as she idly kicks the cabinets with the swing of her heels.

Her phone chimes, and she smiles to read his text.

**Rickon:** Sounds good, be right over

By the time he pulls up in front of the house she’s waiting outside for him, enjoying the first spatter-pats of rain on the lower stairs and walkway, and like all Tucsonans he’s a slow moving amble even when the rain comes down harder. No desert kid minds a walk in the rain. He’s in a green and white baseball jersey and it’s already wet in several wide splotches by the time he makes it under the porch eave, is a pair of greeny-blue eyes that meet hers readily now when she says _Hey._ She isn’t sure if he drinks wine but she has a glass waiting for him just in case, watered down white from the ice cubes she added. To her surprise it makes him laugh when he drops himself down on the stairs beside her.

“Just the way mom used to make,” he says, nodding his thanks when she holds up the glass. His fingers have rain on them, are a cool slide against hers as she hands him his wine. “Sansa finally gave in and started doing it too, and now here we are,” he says, taking a long sip of wine.

“Here we are,” she says, and they’re quiet, just as she knew they’d be, just as she hoped, as they watch the lightning fork, feel the rain roll in, listen to the thunder. The harder the rain beats down the better she feels, because it’s the sky falling apart and letting itself go, which is exactly what she wants to do. She drinks her wine, her hand an occasional brush against his when they both reach into the bag of chips at the same time, stretches her legs out so her bare feet can get a bath from the sky.

“Jesus,” he says after a particularly loud and close cracking shudder of thunder, and she glances down at the glass in his hand, thinks of the splintery shards she pulled out of his palm, is about to ask when he catches her look and sighs. “I know what you’re thinking, and I’m fine, really. Rain is- storms are a good thing. It was all bleached out crazy desert over there. Nothing about a thunderstorm could uh, could trigger me, if that’s what you’re worried about. That was just a big fucking crash of thunder, that’s all.”

Shireen laughs, in turn making him grin, and she nods. “Okay,” she says. “Fair enough.”

“But thank you for asking,” he says, leaning into her slightly as he reaches in for another chip. “Or for not asking, whichever. So,” he says after a few beats. “How bad was this shitty meeting of yours?” he asks, head bowed as he gazes down into his wine glass, and it’s kind of hard to believe that Rickon is asking her to further a conversation, harder to believe that of all the people, after Gendry and Arya and Sansa texted her all afternoon that _he_ is who she wants to tell. But he’s got something of loss about him, something empty he doesn’t seem sure how to fill up. It speaks to her.

“You smoke, right?” she asks suddenly. “I think I’ve seen you outside at night with your little cherry bouncing around like a firefly,” she says, and he huffs a laugh.

“Sometimes, yeah. Why, you want one?”

“ _Yes_ ,” she says with conviction.

He laughs again, straightening his long legs under the fall of rain to dig out a pack of Camels, lights two cigarettes at one time before handing her one of them. Shireen thanks him, takes a long sip of wine before inhaling.

“That bad, huh,” he says.

“That bad,” she agrees, taking another drag and exhaling it, rich and luxuriant, and after another sip of wine, Shireen opens her mouth and tells him everything. The Will, the threats, the bald faced lies and the shit talk sent her way. She tells Rickon how angry and impotent, how weak and trapped she felt, which was only made worse by a horrible kiss at a bar afterwards.

“Ah,” he says after lighting them two more cigarettes once she comes back with more wine. He’s reclining on the porch floor, resting back on his elbows with a cigarette in one hand and his glass in the other. “Bad kisses don’t really help out much, do they,” he says.

She laughs and shakes her head, brushes the back of her wrist under her eyes where rain has nothing to do with why her cheeks are wet. She sits down beside him, hunched over her knees, and looks back at him. He’s already there, gaze at the ready.

“No, they don’t,” she says. “It’s hard to remember the last time they were even good,” she murmurs, taking a drag and gazing out at the slowing rainfall, little more now than soft tiptoes, tiny droplets in puddles, small splashes that make the oleander leaves twitch and stutter.

“Tell me about it,” Rickon sighs, and she smiles sadly into the dark.

 


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/123093406218/a-world-alone-chapter-6)

She holds the steering wheel with her left hand, traces circles on the console with her right, and Rickon finds himself watching that slow sleepy movement as much as he watches the elevation change the landscape outside the passenger window. He watches desert rock and 200 year old saguaros pass him by, their thick arms reaching up to the sky or curving parallel to the ground like a ballerina’s. He gazes at juniper scrub brush and narrow, jagged folds that become waterfalls in the winter, white-trunked aspens that shiver their lady’s fan leaves whenever the wind blows. They are driving up Mt Lemmon Highway and he is pretending the cooler temperatures at the top are calling, pretending it’s all for the hiking they’re going to do, pretending it’s not his fear he is running from.

It is the 4th of July, a hot and humid day that has already very nearly given Rickon a heart attack. He was woken up midmorning, having finally fallen asleep only two hours earlier, by the neighbors setting off fireworks in their backyard. Shaggydog was a whine and a howl when Rickon shot out of bed like a snapped rubber band, pacing the floor until finally his heartrate pounded its way down towards normal. His face was buried in his dog’s coat when his phone buzzed with a text from Shireen asking if he and Wylla wanted to go hiking up on Mt. Lemmon, a blissful hour’s drive away from gas station fireworks and day drinkers. Wylls has been at a two day music festival north of Phoenix, so here he is, in the passenger seat of Shireen’s car with Shaggy’s wet nose a frequent nudge against the back of his neck, gazing at the changing landscape while Shireen hums along to the music on the radio.

“Is this a favorite song of yours?” he asks the window, turning in time to see her glance from the road to him.

She looks over the black rims of her sunglasses, a smile from behind her bitten lower lip. He smiles when she returns her attention to the road.

“Sorry, was I singing along? Sometimes I do it without noticing,” she says, reaching out to turn down the volume with the press of her fingertips to the knob.

“Nope, just humming,” he says, reaching out to still her hand with his, to turn the volume back up. It’s pleasant, mellow, nothing clanging or jarring to it; no surprise then that _she_ likes it. “You don’t have to turn it down, it’s a good song,” he says, moving his hand and dropping it back on his thigh.

“Yeah, but I know how you feel about noise, and a week or so ago you told me in a text that you don’t really like music,” she says, wrapping both hands around the steering wheel now as the turns become more intense. 

“It isn’t all music, or all noise,” Rickon sighs, twisting in his seat and reaching behind him to scratch Shaggy’s chest, and he’s a hot dog-breath pant right in his face. “And it’s not all the time either, I just uh, hmm,” he says, trying to find the words, trying to string them together to make a coherent thought.

“You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to,” she says, slowing the car to go round a hairpin turn, bringing them onto a stretch of highway with a stunning view of the valley below, and both of their attentions are stolen away.

The heat of day casts a haze over the city like it’s a mirage, the trees amongst the neighborhoods and along the washes pale green like the smear of avocado, surrounding desert a cocoa powder brown. The north-south line of Houghton Road cuts stick-straight across the desert floor like the blade of a knife, and the small downtown center with its scant skyscrapers thrusts up like a splinter off to the west. Fat clouds hang out on the southern edges of a sky so blue you can’t look at it without squinting, so blinding blue it looks depthless at the same time that it looks flat as a piece of paper, it is so opaquely true to itself.

“God, that view never gets old, does it,” she says, stealing as many quick looks as she can before the car zips around the mountain face and dips back into steeply pitched crannies squeezed between round-topped peaks.

“No, it doesn’t,” he says, and there is a strange, absolutely strange urge in him to open his mouth and _speak,_ as if her assurance he need not tell her is the perfect temptation to do just that, like it’s some vestige of that old teenage rebellion he was made of before the army squeezed it out of him like sweat from a rag.  

It still takes him another twenty minutes to find the words.

“It’s not all music and it’s not all noise,” he says quietly, looking at her after paying some much needed attention to Shaggy, who stands on the backseat like he’s trying to surf.

“So, just the loud stuff, like with the coffee table at my place a few weeks ago?” she asks, her head turning towards him as the car rounds the tight curve on the switchback road in his direction, and now there is a drop off on his side, rocks and grass on the other side of the guardrail before it’s just the tops of pine trees and not much else.

He nods, pausing a moment as he realizes that what she said is true, that they’ve known each other weeks now, but perhaps it’s not such a surprise, not when she texted him this morning as a friend and not an employer, someone as alone as he is and looking to run away. What she’s running from he thinks he knows, but she has yet to speak of it. They are two tough nuts, impenetrable save for those little fissures only they know of, those hairline cracks that spell out doom if ever anyone knows about them. And yet still he speaks.

“The loud stuff, big bangs, helicopters sometimes, though the air force base totally numbed me for all the fucking planes in the air,” he says, making mention of Tucson's Davis-Monthan AFB, where he was this close to heading before the idiot in him whispered _Not enough challenge. I want to sweat blood._ “Those sudden booming sounds, they- it- they bring me right back. Or just fuck with my head, like this—” he says, shutting himself up and rolling his eyes when Shireen turns the music off.

“Like I said, it’s not _every_ sound,” he says, slouching slightly in his seat as he looks out the window¸ surly like a child.

“I did it because we’re having a _conversation_ , Rickon, not because I think you’re made out of tissue paper,” she says. “I want to listen to you, not some song right now, if that’s _okay,_ ” she says, something of the brat to her voice, and he exhales a laugh through his nose.

“All right, all right. You’re the driver so you’re the boss.”

“You were saying,” she says, voice dripping with sweet like melting ice cream, ever a goad if he’s heard one. Rickon rolls his eyes again, first to the ceiling of the car and then to the view outside.

“Like this morning. There were fireworks,” he finally says, scrubbing his face with his palms before he pulls away from the smell of dog on them.

“Fireworks?”

“Yeah.”

He tells her how the sound that makes most people think of their snap-crackle-pop cereal makes him think of the _rata-tat-tat_ of automatic gunfire. He tells her, haltingly, a start and stall that takes them all the way up to the parking lot of Box Camp Trail that he already hears those sounds in his dreams, not with his ears but with his very bones. That to wake up to the audial horror of gunfire when he is supposed to wake up and be _free_ of it sends him into an altogether different sort of horror.

“Not like, you know, like I was at your house,” he says when they get out of the car, Shaggydog a whump of black dog on the asphalt before immediately trotting to the low wall separating mountain from parking lot. “It’s not like I forget where- it’s not like I’m brought right back to that place, that time. It’s just, you know,” he says lamely, coming up short as she pops the trunk.

“It’s a panic attack,” she says simply, smiling when he reaches in and hoists up her water backpack before grabbing his own, lifting her eyes to his.

It is so frank and nonchalant, as if he hasn’t been talking about hearing sounds with his bones and thinking of gunfire when it’s just a few crackly fireworks bought down at the Shell station half a mile away.  She closes the trunk, shrugging her other arm into her backpack, makes him think of EB when she gives him a look of such understanding, and none of that doe eyed horseshit Wylla tried when he first got back, all faux sympathy over something she could never understand. And yet here is Shireen, slathering sunblock on her arms before she hands him the tube, looking at him as if maybe she spent a few months overseas herself.

“Yeah, a panic attack,” he says, frowning in confusion.

He smears sunscreen on his arms and the back of his neck, uses what’s left on his hand to slather on his forehead and nose before sliding on his shades. He follows her with a shake of his head as she heads off to where Shaggy is already making headway up the steep hill towards the trailhead.

They’re quiet for the onslaught of the hike, waiting until the trees open up to a fire-scorched slanted hill that is beginning to at last see regrowth, and finally they can catch their breath as the terrain flattens, as they adjust to the altitude and the short incline that started them off. He breathes in and he breathes out, relishing in the silence, or rather the lack of noise from _people_ , all save for him and Shireen. He can hear birds twit and call overhead, the wind through the trees and the way it slides up against the mountain, the crunch of grass and old pine needles underfoot. He hears his breathing and the beating of his heart, can hear her inhale deeply to conquer her windedness, the sighing rush of her exhale, can hear the chugging happy pant of his dog as he crosses their path to and fro like he’s needle and thread trying to stitch up the trail like a wound.

“I used to get them, you know,” she says when they’ve finally gotten to part of the trail where it descends, a billy goat twist and curve and bend amongst trees and rocks and chortling streams. A three day hike would take them all the way down to Sabino Canyon, and the runaway in him imagines it, just walking down the mountain and never looking back.

“Get what?” he huffs behind her, turning his body as he takes a long step down between two boulders.

“Panic attacks,” she says, pausing at a bend in the trail to look up at him with her hands on her hips. “Whenever I had to leave the house. Because of the um, you know,” she says, pointing to her cheek, and he laughs, unable to keep it in.

“That’s funny,” he says before leaping down over a tree root to stand in front of her.

She frowns, cocks her hip out, folds her arms across her chest, and it takes him a moment to realize that she’s glaring at him from behind her sunglasses.

“ _Excuse_ me? You, who literally _just_ had a panic attack this morning, are now calling mine _funny_? Asshole,” she says, shoving him in the chest so he staggers back, and he grabs her by the wrist even though he bumps back against roots and soil and rock instead of tumbling down to the brook below.

“Hey now, I meant it’s funny because, no, wait,” he says, lowering his grip on her, looking into her angry and hurt face. Rickon has to be careful here with his words, he can see right off the bat. _You’ve got a great track record with her and those scars. Maybe you_ are _an asshole._ “What I meant,” he says slowly, taking a deep breath, “what I meant was that it’s funny _to me_ because uh, I don’t even notice them. Honestly. So you tell me you used to get panic attacks and I’m thinking it was from something major, when it’s only because of those little things,” he says.

“They are _not_ little things, they are fucking _horrible,_ okay? Talk about a nightmare,” she says, voice high, but then she stops when he reaches out for her without thinking.

He brushes his thumb across the left plane of her cheek, and the bumps and pocks smooth out when her skin is pulled ever so lightly by the push of his thumb against her skin. His forefinger is in a crook under the line of her jaw as if to hold her in place, and he takes advantage of the stillness to draw his thumb all the lighter across her cheek, and _there_ , now he feels the unevenness, like the surface of corkboard if her skin wasn’t so soft. He can smell sunscreen on them that makes him think of childhood summer days out by his parents’ pool, can just see the shape of her eyes from behind her sunglasses, can here the unhurried business of breezes pushing their way through pine needles and aspen leaves.  It’s peace and quiet and he breathes it in, lets it go, breathes it all in again.

“Rickon, please,” she says, fingers a light wrap around his hand as she draws it slowly away from her face, fingertips pressing into his palm.

That’s when he realizes he’s still got her wrist in his other hand, each of them captured by the other for whatever reason, the slowest of parries here in the dappled summer sunlight. He smiles.

“See? They’re nothing, Shireen.”

 

He’s smiling and steady, even when she presses into his palm she as pulls his hand from her face, even when she twists her wrist to free it from his light grasp.  Rickon’s hand is still half raised at the height of his ribs when she finally lets go of him, and it hovers there a split second as if there were a small heap of birdseed there to offer to the wildlife flitting above them. But then it’s gone, the hand dropped and the smile along with it, and she resists the urge to run her fingers around her wrist where he had her snared.

“I’m sorry,” they say in unison, Shireen to the packed dirt trail at their feet, Rickon to somewhere above her head and off to the side.

“Don’t worry about it,” they say together again, and when she laughs at their second jinx and lifts her gaze to him he’s looking at her. It’s a mixed bag of expressions, exasperation, amusement, and confusion in one, and she can’t help but grin because it makes her feel like she’s got the upper hand though she’s still flustered as all get out from the way he touched her face.

“You’re something else, you know that,” he says, shaking his head as he so often does, looking up at the canopy above them before lowering his head to look at her.

 “You’re a real piece of work yourself,” Shireen says with a shrug, and his laugh makes her grin broaden.

“Fair enough,” he says. “Come on, let’s go find Shaggy, he’s probably halfway down to the canyon by now.”

Rickon slips past her on the downward slope and unraveled ribbon of trail, fingers a brush against her arm as he drops down from their plateau to continue towards the stream. She watches his shoulders and the strength of him as he blazes ahead, sees the little boy come out in creeps and crawls. The way he finds sticks too small to use as staffs or canes and instead whips them against rocks or swishes them through thick bunches of juniper, how he grows bored of simply walking the trail and instead decides to hop from boulder to boulder. So many sides to him: rough and tumble, haunted and shadowed, serious and disciplined, and yet it is he who reached out for her cheek in the way that _no_ one has, not even her parents.

Before she can stop herself, she reaches up and touches her cheek, the nasty craters and raised bumps, tries to feel them the way he did, as things of no consequence, but all she feels is rejection and shame, humiliation and self-hatred. She’s so deep in her thoughts and those black-edged memories that come skittering in on spider’s legs, that she almost misses when Rickon miscalculates one of his jumps, slips on wet moss and lands ass first in a pool of spring water about four feet deep and as many degrees warm, judging by his reaction.

“Jesus, _fuck_ , it’s cold,” he says, his arms two propellers as he tries to find his footing, but he only serves to attract his dog, who comes galloping down the slope opposite the stream, pink tongue flapping out of his open mouth like a flag of excitement. “No, Shaggy, NO! Bad dog- no- Mother _fucker!_ ”

When Shaggydog bounds off the poolside rock and belly flops next to Rickon, Shireen is laughing so hard she sinks to her bare knees and the palms of her hands. There’s the dig of a pine cone on her shin, the needles are itchy and the dirt is a grit but she doesn’t care. Sunglasses slide off her nose to the ground and when she looks up without their shade she sees him standing in the center of the pool while his dog paddles in happy, splashing circles around him. He is glaring at her, and if looks could kill she’d be dead and buried.

“Yeah, keep it up, sister. Just remember your car’s gonna smell like wet dog the entire way home,” he snaps.

It only makes her laugh harder.

“So,” he says half an hour later, after they hiked down until they found a large flat surface of rock with a perfect ray of sunshine warming it. It’s where they’re sitting now as he tries to dry off. He’s shirtless and barefoot but still wearing his soaked cargos, and they’re both stretched out in full like sunbathers as Shaggy pants happily from the shade of a pine tree close to the trail. “Panic attacks over the scars, huh.”

“Mm hmm,” she hums, eyes closed behind her sunglasses, because she is enjoying this basking moment though she had to put on another layer of sunblock before risking it. But the idea of warming up like a little berry in the sun is a pleasant thought and a delicious feeling, considering how many times his rotten wet dog brushed up against her legs, soaking her skin and dampening her shorts.

“Is it- did you get the attacks because of _how_ you got the scars?”

His head is tipped towards her when she looks his way, and they both of them shade the sides of their own faces with hands held up to block the sun. She shakes her head, the rock a scratch against her good cheek, and she almost laughs to think of scarring _that_ one too, almost the same way she made the left one worse all those years ago.

“No, I got the attacks because I didn’t want to leave the house. Every time I did, there were stares and comments, laughter and the shittiest, shittiest jokes,” she says. “School was a nightmare. Kids egged my car, and I was literally TP’d one year after homecoming. Toilet paper all over me, shaving cream in my hair, the whole nine yards.”

“That’s incredibly fucked up,” Rickon says, and she nods.

She is almost ten years out of high school and yet still there is the sting of tears in her eyes. Not because it still hurts her but because of how much it hurt the sixteen year old Shireen. If she could, she’d go back in time to kick everyone’s asses, right in front of herself if need be. _You’re not alone,_ she’d say to herself. _I’m here waiting for you, just hold on._ Unbidden, tears come, one sliding straight to the rock beneath her, the other taking the longer track to the bridge of her nose where her sunglasses trap it.

“God, look at me,” she says with a watery chuckle, turning to face the sky as she wipes her eyes beneath her shades, pulling her fingers up and out to stare at the tears that wet them.

“ _I’m_ looking at you,” Rickon says to her right. “I’m looking right at you, and I don’t see anything wrong.”

She laughs now in earnest, covering her sunglasses with tear-soaked hands, shaking her head because everything is wrong save for this moment, and she tells him so. Her dad is dead and her stepmom plots against her, some goons broke her entire life apart one piece of home at a time, and then the one romantic interest she’s had her whole adult life basically ignored all of that and tried to dive in for a French kiss that was less romance than overeager pressure and excess spit.

“But here I am, laughing my ass off about it all, here in the sun with you, of all people,” she says, inhaling to sigh out one more sad chuckle, _because honestly, how did I end up here?_

“What the fuck, man, I’ll have you know of all people, I am _just_ fine,” he says with a cranky twist to his voice, more of that little boy coming through in his tone and the way he readjusts his body, a slight shuffle of his hips, a huff of temper and indignation.

“Rickon, _please_ ,” she says for a second time that day, this time with a flicker of impatience and the hope he understands her, and this time, _this_ time, when she says it he laughs too.

It’s a _hah_ sort of sound that she figures will be all on its own, but then suddenly he belts out another one, and then another and another, until his shoulders shake and his hands rest on his bare stomach as if they try to hold it all in. Soon she’s laughing again too, eyes closed against the sun that beats down, arms thrown back above her head, her knuckles a light graze against that long stretch of rock they lie on. For some stupid reason it all feels _good,_ a nice scrape of reality, a strong dose of the here and the now.

“All right _fine_ ,” he says, laughter his punctuation until it fades to an amused sigh. “Fine. I’m fucked up, you’re fucked up. At least today’s a good day, right? I haven’t broken any glasses and you’ve only cried once, so I guess it’s a success, huh,” he says, and she grins.

“Yeah, it’s all right, I guess,” she says, glancing over to him, and he’s got a smile on his face that he’s offering straight up to the sky, his face in perfect profile to her, and she can see that under his shades his eyes are closed.

Shireen looks back to the su, letting the bright star sear her vision a moment before she closes her eyes too. The tree boughs above them toss and twist in a breeze that occasionally makes its way down to push the baby hairs off of her forehead. Shaggydog’s panting breath can be heard on a fade in and fade out whenever he crosses the rock from shady spot to shady spot. There is a sudden crack and drop of an old tree branch far, far down the trail that reminds her of what a firecracker might sound like, but when she opens her eyes in surprise and lifts her head to look at Rickon, he’s still got his eyes closed with that smile on his face.

She puts her head back down, closes her eyes, and listens to the wind go in and out.

“So, I was thinking,” she says later, much later when they’re almost back to her car, dry and sunbaked and wobbly-limbed tired.

She’s already almost slipped off of rocks twice, captured up with Rickon’s quick grip on her forearm or shoulder, but to her credit she literally caught him before he fell backwards after trying to climb onto a fallen log. He thanked her with a grin.

“Sounds dangerous; what about?” he says, slinging the backpack off his shoulders when they crest the hill and see the roof of her car. His long legs take him down the slope faster than hers do, and she sees how soaked with sweat his shirt is. It makes her feel the weariness in her bones all the more.

“You,” she says, and he turns to look back at her with a look on his face that in her mind she’s starting to call ‘The Rickon’: that wry amusement and a hint of a smile, that dog-tilt-confusion of his head and the slightest of frowns.

“This ought to be good,” he says, leaning against the hood of her car as she picks her way down towards him.

“Well,” she says with a huff as she jogs down the rest of the way before her feet touch the low stone wall flanking the parking lot. Her shoulders ache when she slips out of her backpack, though nearly all the water’s gone by now, and she chucks it to the wall by her feet. “I don’t think you need to tell me your past stuff if you don’t want to, but I think whatever you’ve said today has probably been pretty good for you, right? You seem pretty chill right now,” she says, squatting down to drop her feet to the parking lot.

“Yeah, so what,” he says, pushing off the car to grab her pack before she can, turning away from her to walk to her trunk.

She perseveres.

“So, I think you should talk about it more. Not to me,” she says as she follows him, stopping short when he rounds on her. “But you should probably talk to someone, Ric,” she says.

He stares her down, eyes dropping to her feet and back up again, like he’s sizing up an obstacle instead of measuring a friend. _Maybe both,_ she thinks, _what the hell do I know._ She stares him back best as she can, going so far as planting her hands on her tired hips, raising her eyebrows and looking up. He huffs finally, rapping his knuckles on the trunk of her car before she starts with a slight jolt of embarrassment, digging the keys from her pocket to unlock it.

“Fine then,” he says, chucking both of their bags in her trunk once it’s open. “But if I’m gonna do something then so are you.” Rickon shuts the trunk with a one hand, walking round to open the backseat for his dog.

“Do what, face my fears?” she asks once they’re back in the car, Shaggydog a slump of black fur on her backseat when she finally gets them back on the highway. “I face _those_ every time I look in the mirror.”

“Not your scars. For fuck’s sake, those aren’t a fear, those are just you,” he says before he yawns, and she bites back a smile. “And I don’t mean fears. I faced mine _months_ ago, and I guess you’ve already buried yours. Sorry,” he says when she winces at the road, and it’s then that she realizes he’s looking at her. “What I mean is the shit you’re dealing with about Mel. If I have to face _my_ consequences then so do you,” he says.

“Well, what the hell does that mean?” she says. “What do I do, bust into her house and claim it as my own? Kick down the door and cry ‘havoc’?” Shireen glances over at him, sees him just as he shrugs with a grin to the sunset outside his window.

“Maybe,” he says. “’Havoc’ sounds kinda cool, to be honest.”

 

“I’m just fucking surprised the kid said anything. Two months of nothing and then out of the blue, _wham_ ,” Alliser says.

“Blow it out your ass, Thorne,” says Barristan before a bout of smoker’s cough takes him out of the conversation.

Rickon sits in the circle in the elementary school room, head bowed with his elbows resting on his knees, his forehead cradled in the palms of his hands, listening to the sounds of chairs scraping the linoleum, the shuffle of footfalls as the rest of group make their way into dark hallway. A few people stop beside him, laying their hands on his shoulder, murmuring a bunch of bullshit he doesn’t want to hear.

“I’m sorry, Rickon,” Brienne says. He stares at the toes of her beat up running shoes, the only bit of her he can see from his limited vantage point, shrugs up under the weight of her hand, both a response and a request for her to move on. She does.

“Thank you for sharing, mate,” Rama says. Rickon closes his eyes, listens to his uneven gait as he walks across the room to the door. _Osha’s leg, pink bandana, blood seeping into the dirt, hot and red like melted wax._

“Hey man,” Sandor says, not bothering to touch him because out of everyone here, they have an understanding. “I’ll be at your sisters’ place later if you want to have a beer or something.”

Rickon shakes his head.

“Suit yourself. You know where we’ll be if you need anything,” he says, deep grating voice a drift away as Sandor leaves the room.

He lets loose a deeply held breath even though he knows someone is still here, can feel Elder Brother’s presence as easily as he can hear him shuffling papers and getting his stuff together. Rickon stares at the square of tile between his feet and at the fraying hems of his jeans, wondering if this shitty, shitty feeling is what catharsis is supposed to feel like. If there were a cave to crawl into right now, he’d do it, and tear down the mouth of it to lock himself away.He wants to vomit, tear his hair out, and a small, silvery, trembling part of him wants to cry.

“I have to admit, I was surprised that you wanted to take the floor today, Rickon,” EB says with that light and noncommittal voice of his.

It’s a take it or leave it sort of comment, he knows this, knows he can just get to his feet and walk on out of here. Part of him wants to. _How many fucking pieces of me are there?_

“Someone convinced me it would be a good idea, though right now I’m not so sure. I kind of want to wring her neck,” he mutters, tipping his face up, sliding his hands down, as if he could wipe away whatever it is he’s feeling.

“Is this Wylla we’re talking about?” EB says, and Rickon starts, turning to stare at his therapist, racking his brain as he tries to remember when he ever mentioned her. _In the beginning,_ he remembers, when she tried joining him for a group. How mortifying that was, when brazen Wylls came barging in, expecting to sit in like some sort of den mother.

“No, not Wylla. Shireen. She’s a friend,” he says.

“Ah,” says his therapist. “How are you Wylla doing these days?” he asks, and Rickon sits back in a slouch, shifting his view from tile floor to tile ceiling.

They haven’t hung out in days, not since the day after the 4th of July when she came over at one in the morning, slinging her shoes in the corner of the den before crawling on his lap. Her hair was tinted silver from the light of the television behind her, and she moved the way he’s known since high school, hips a back and forth and an up and down. She tried everything and he let his hands roam everywhere, buried his face in the crook of her neck where she always smells like sandalwood, but still he couldn’t get hard. His thoughts were scrambled, the smell of her sunblock kept distracting him, and he couldn’t stop thinking long enough to enjoy the present. _We’re like oil and water these days, aren’t we babe_ she said before grabbing a beer from the kitchen, leaving his house barefoot. Her sandals are still in the corner of the room.

“Not good,” he sighs.

“Why is that, you think?” EB asks, dropping the pretense of getting ready to go, sitting in the chair next to Rickon’s. He leans back on the hard plastic, props his ankle up on his knee as he regards him.

“We’re too different now. She doesn’t want to change, and I don’t want her to either, but I’m not- I’m not the guy that went to Iraq. I’m just the guy who came back, and I don’t think either of us really like him,” he says with another sigh.

He tells him there are three people in the relationship, Wylla, Rickon, and Rickon’s ghost. The memory of the guy who used to sneak onto the guest ranch on Tanque Verde, break into the stables and ride horses bareback with her, the guy who used to carry her on his shoulders into mosh pits, the guy who laughed all the time.

“I can’t compete with that guy, and she can’t forget him,” he says.

“Neither of you should have to do those things, but you both need to move on. That man isn’t completely gone, he’s just different. You both have to adapt to that” he says.

Rickon imagines Wylla sitting at home playing shitty old video games with him on a Saturday night instead of hearing live music with her head two feet from a speaker, imagines her smiling at the Rickon he is now the way she did back before he left, tries to remember what it felt like when he wasn’t just _inside_ her but was _lost_ in her.  

“Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Then you know what you’ve got to do, I think,” EB says, and there’s empathy to his voice, just the right dose of sadness.

Rickon nods.

She smiles when she opens the door and sees it’s him, her green hair a tangle from sleeping in past noon, her droopy-hemmed dress falling off one shoulder when she props an elbow against the door frame.

“To what do I owe the pleasure,” she says with a rumpled sort of confidence in him that makes Rickon hate himself for what he’s going to do.

“I don’t think it’ll be pleasure,” he says with a sigh, walking past her when she frowns and straightens, closing the door against the heat and brilliance of the day.

She cries when he tells her they can’t do this dance anymore, and it tears at him, takes some of those pieces of Rickon and rips them up even more. She tells him to fuck himself when he says he doesn’t want to hurt her but that he can’t pretend to be something he’s not, can’t ignore it when she pretends he’s the same man he was a year ago.

“This is _bullshit_. You just don’t want to try,” she says, pacing like a caged lion in front of him, swiping angrily at her wet face.

Every woman he comes into contact with seems to cry, these days. Shireen in the sun pops into his head, tears on her fingers as she basked on the rock like a wood sprite, and he feels instantly guilty for thinking of another girl right now. But then her words fall and soak into him, and now he’s angry. Rickon stands, walks into her path and stops her short, looks down at the angry sea glare she’s giving him.

“Try? You think I don’t want to try, you think I _haven’t_ tried?” he says, voice raised enough that she closes her mouth right after opening it to yell at him again. “I’ve tried ever since I came back, but it’s a shirt that doesn’t fucking fit anymore. Hell, Wylla, it’s not even a shirt I own anymore, or even want to wear. I mean,” he says, getting himself lost in the metaphor. Rickon shakes his head angrily, frustration mounting because he cannot find the right words.

“You’re not even making any sense, Ric, what the hell. Is- I mean, is there another woman? Is it that chick with the scars, are you fucking her or something?” she says, fingers of both hands a tug in the thicket of her hair as she sidesteps him and paces, paces, paces. Of course she’d take it there, make it something base and easier to understand than the tricks her mind has been playing on her the past four months.

“No, I’m not fucking Shireen, and I’m not fucking anyone else, either. Besides, we both did _plenty_ of that after I left, at _your_ insistence, so please don’t act like I’m ending this on a goddamned technicality,” he says, starting to walk the floor himself a bit now.

“Then why now? Why now, all of a sudden, after all we’ve- after _everything,_ it just stops now? Tell me why. Tell me. Tell me, huh?” she says, grabbing him by the bicep to pull him back around to face her.

He’s known her for seven years, since they were sixteen back when her hair was blonde. Seven years of shared smiles and laughter and secrets, seven years of being mystified and aggravated and blown away by her. Seven years of loving her and knowing the feel of her heart can’t be mistaken; he knows the ins and the outs of her. Rickon inhales, cups her face in his hands and looks at her, really looks.

“He’s gone, Wylls. That old Rickon, he’s gone, and he’s not coming back. I’m all that’s left, and I think it’s time we both stop pretending that I’m the one you love.”

“Rickon, stop it,” she starts, but he shakes his head.

“I’ll always love you, but you look at me and tell me you’re in love with the guy who is standing here right now.” He gazes at her, sees the fear and blossom of despair in the pale of her eyes.

“I- oh,” she says, bursting into tears.

It’s a wild animal sound, her sobbing, and it makes him close his eyes, and he stands there listening to his girlfriend – _ex girlfriend –_ mourn for what is essentially another man, holds her against his chest with his chin resting on the crown of her head as she cries her heart out.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, kissing her forehead. He wishes he could change it, wishes he could fix it, but however he broke and knit back together has stuck. “I’m sorry.”

“I just miss you so much. I miss _him_. So, so much,” she says later, voice a wet crack and splinter.

They’re curled up on her ratty old sofa, her head on his chest like the way they used to lie in bed when she’d count his heartbeats until she fell asleep. He runs his fingers through her tousle of hair, skimming over the knots so he can get down to the lengths of it, holds a green lock of it under his nose. It smells like incense and cigarettes, and it makes the ghost of him smile to remember it.

“So do I, babe. So do I.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/123667678373/a-world-alone-chapter-7)   
>  [The Stark family](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/123591617658/jillypups-the-stark-family-a-world-alone)   
>  [Stark babies and their true loves](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/123591534838/jillypups-a-world-alone-robb-and-dacey-bran-and)   
>  [Robb!!](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/123683799507/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)   
>  [Dacey!](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/123821892727/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)   
>  [My bb Jojen](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/124031523052/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)   
>  [My bb Bran](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/125471822237/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)

The sun is out though Sansa can hear the heavy pats of a lazy midafternoon rainstorm on the pitched roof overhead, and when she takes her phone and laptop out to the covered front porch she has the lovely experience of light streaming through cadet blue clouds that crackle every so often with lightning. Out here the noise is far more boisterous, especially as the sun is slowly blotted out and the storm asserts itself with more thunder-boom authority, and she lets the drum of it lull her into the zone as she balances accounts for Stark Security.

She’s got her bare feet propped up on the low wall surrounding the porch, ankles crossed under the light weight of her dress, is a comfy slouch in her plastic chair with the laptop balances on her thighs. The light is a warm grey made fat and ethereal with that persistent glow from behind the clouds, veined white like marble where the sun is, deeper blue where the cloud cover is thickest. It’s hot and it’s humid, but she’s got her hair twisted up on top of her head, can feel the occasional creosote gust of breeze on the nape of her neck. A summer storm is too fine a thing to waste, and her excitement to see him is too big to keep trapped inside the house.

Ten minutes in and she has several tabs open on the laptop, online bank accounts and a few emails, one from Bran giving her the cost of Shireen’s security system and another detailing Robb’s time put in changing her locks, and she switches windows with the tab command, adds together time and labor in an Excel spreadsheet before checking her text messages for Rickon’s time. She scrolls through the texts, frowns when she cannot find the time he put in over the 4th, though she knows he was with Shireen most of the day as well as all evening. She found him next morning on their sofa, a sleeping sprawl of sun soaked arms and cargo pants that smelled like wet dog, and after he woke he swore up and down he didn’t fall asleep until sunrise when duties switch from him to their sister.

“Hey, it’s me,” she says when she calls her parents and her dad answers the phone, an informal rumpled hello since she called his personal cell.

“Well, hey Sansa,” he says with a pleasant sounding sigh and the subsequent _whump_ of him landing somewhere. “How’re you, sweetheart?”

She can picture with her mind’s eye the sight of him dropping onto the sofa or maybe even a lounge chair outside by the pool; she’d be surprised if this downtown rain stretches as far east as where her parents live. Monsoon storms are thick clusters of noise and chaos, are rarely the widespread things that can blanket a city from one end to the other the way some cities experience rain.

“I’m good,” she says, setting the laptop on the seat of the chair beside her as she re-crosses her ankles. “I was just wondering, has Rickon started sending you his time by chance?”

“No, not that I’m aware of,” he says, and there’s a shuffle and muffle as he takes the phone from his ear, the murmurs of conversation as he asks her mom. “Your mother hasn’t heard anything either. Is everything okay?”

She tells him everything’s fine, only that Rickon is spending more time with Shireen than he’s logging hours for, but then suddenly she smiles, tipping her head to the side, watching mayflies buzz about the oleanders and pomegranate bushes in dizzy confusion from the smattering rainfall.

“Maybe he’s forgetting to do so. I highly doubt he was turning in a time sheet every day overseas,” her dad says. “Robb, if you jump in from here you’re going to get me all- oh, for Pete’s sake,” he mutters, and there is a scuff and scrape, a shuffle and perhaps a choice word or two spoken under his breath, and Sansa laughs.

“I don’t know, maybe,” she says. “But now that I look back on it, I think they’re actually becoming friends; they certainly seem to get along. They spent all of the 4th together, not just the night shift that he agreed to, and there’s at least once or twice he’s been here hanging out without texting me his hours.”

“Robb says your brother seems to enjoy working. Maybe he’s just throwing himself into it,” he says, and it’s a familiar script when Ned delves into what he hopes for his youngest son, that he just wants Rickon to enjoy some normalcy again.

Sansa smiles, because their father hasn’t seen how Rickon’s guard seems to drop away whenever Shireen is around these days, hasn’t witnessed the way their client brightens if it’s Rickon walking through the door. They are a pair of night owls on the sofa eating junk food at one in the morning, two bumps on a log instead of security detail and paying customer, but whatever friendship they’ve struck up together it seems to do them both good. There is less crying in the mornings here, less of that thin sound of despair trickling down from the loft, and there’s not so much moody silence, anymore, when her little brother drops in. Sansa smiles, because it’s not the normalcy Ned is thinking of, but whatever it is, it’s _good_. That much she knows.

But there are altogether different reasons for her smiles when a white Chevy Tahoe pulls up in front of the house, the strengthening sun a weak bounce on the hood, its four tires cutting through a widening puddle and sending small laps of rainwater up and over the curb. She uncrosses her ankles and brings her knees towards her body as she sits up straighter in her chair. The SUV shudders to silence when the driver kills the engine, leaving room in her ears for the opening and slamming shut of a door, the sounds of wet footfalls that materialize into the shape of a tall man as he walks around the front of his car. He rolls the sleeves of his uniform up his arms, just below the elbow, before he crosses the sidewalk and unlatches the gate to the walk that leads the way up the steps towards her.

Sansa is thirty years old, has experienced the heart-dropping flutter of a first kiss on a first date, knows the love struck sweet misery of waiting for a phone call, has walked down the aisle just to sign the divorce papers a few years later, but there is something about this man that makes it all scare up and fly away. Something about the way he looks at her with that dark steady burn, a slow lift of his eyes to hers as he climbs the stairs, and it traps the air in her lungs until she lets it go with a wavering, shivery _Oh_ that makes him smile and shake his head.

“’Oh’?” her father repeats, and with a jolt Sansa realizes she is still on the phone, that he has been talking to her this whole time.

“I mean, um, I have to go, dad, sorry,” she says, and he’s confused when she hastily tells him she’ll talk to him later and that she loves him, but she’s already ended the call, the phone tossed to the chair beside her laptop when she stands and brushes the long skirt of her dress.

“Hey, there,” Sandor says, all five o’clock shadow in his rained-on game warden shirt, all working man scruff and soldier scars that take over the left side of his face, all army boy tattoos and grizzly bear dark hair peeking out from the folded cuffs of his shirt.

“Hi,” she breathes, smiling with a dip of her chin and the lowering of her eyes as she tries to master herself. She’d tell herself to get a grip but she’s afraid she’ll say the words out loud.

He’s still smiling when she looks back up at him, that upturn of his mouth that doesn’t move the left side of his face, only his right, that small secret thing he’s only just started giving to her, just like he’s doing now. Sansa cannot help but drop her gaze to his mouth, her head a tip to the side when she inhales to speak or send up a prayer or simply just breathe him in.

“So,” he says just as she has the oxygen and gathered thoughts to speak, but it’s taken _time_ to get him opening up, and so she swallows and exhales, meets his gaze as he speaks. Sandor nods towards the chair with the small collection of electronics. “I know I’m a little early, I hope I didn’t interrupt anything. Was it work?”

“No, not really. Well, sort of: work _and_ family, the best of mixes,” she says with a chuckle, and he huffs a laugh at that. “I was just trying to figure out Rickon’s pay, that’s all. He’s doing a ton more hours than he’s logging, and I was just checking up on it.”

“Did you ask him?” Sandor says.

It’s so hard for her to remember that he knows Rickon from therapy in breathless little moments like these, because all she can think of now is when they were at her friend Mya’s bar last weekend and he kissed her for the first time, licked the bourbon and simple syrup right off her tongue. She shakes her head again, glancing down at her phone to stop herself from staring at his mouth again.

“No, but you know him, he’s not really one to just open up and chat, even in a text,” she says.

Sandor shrugs, broadening his stance and folding his arms across his chest to get comfortable, even though the exit of the rain draws away the cloud cover with it, and the bright sun and monsoon moisture make it thick and hot in the close air of the covered porch.

“He talked last session, actually, for the first time. Something’s gotten into him to shake it all loose, so maybe he’ll answer your texts these days.”

Sansa says _Huh_ , _no doubt,_ crossing her arms over her chest in a mirror of him, tilting her head to gaze at him. This is news that can squeeze through the tension between them, this word of her brother opening himself up, and she smiles with a little _I knew it_ and a shake of her head.

“That’s funny, I was just telling my dad that I think he’s making friends with Shireen, that it’s somehow setting him at ease. They hiked Mt Lemmon all day long and then hung out all night on the 4th,”she says.

They stand there looking at each other, and she _knows_ he’s thinking what she’s thinking, how he came over to grill on Independence Day with her, Arya and Gendry, how it rapidly became a huge, cumbersome family affair when Robb and Dacey showed up, when Bran and Jojen came in the backseat of her parents’ car. It was awkward and two shades away from mortifying, introducing her parents to a guy she’s only dated for a couple of weeks. _The look on everyone’s faces when I introduced him,_ she thinks _._ But she has to hand it to him, because he lasted the entire afternoon, didn’t take off until Arya and Gendry left to go watch fireworks.

“Sounds like a date, if you ask me,” he says, leaning forward a few inches, head dropping as he burns a gaze down at her. “A nice quiet date without anyone’s parents dropping in.”

“I was just so happy you didn’t book it out of there the second they showed up. You are a _very_ brave man,” she says with a shake of her head, half shielding her eyes from him with a hand over her forehead.

Sandor rolls his eyes and laughs, a rough and tumble scuffing thing.

“There’s nothing brave about trying not to piss off a beautiful woman’s parents. At least I was clever enough to leave my sunglasses behind that afternoon. I have to admit, I was pretty glad to see your text earlier today,” he says, a low rumble like the thunder that’s ushering itself to the northeast above them.

“Yeah?” she smiles, sighing out her breath, wishing suddenly her hair was down so she had something to do with her hands, somewhere to bury her fidgets.

“I’ll have to forget something else next time I’m here, if it gives me a reason to stop by,” he says, and he is _flirting,_ right here in the sweat drenching heat, right here wedged between a first kiss and a flimsy excuse to get him to come over.

But it’s definitely flirting; she can tell now, can feel it in her bare toes that have the slightest slick of rain on them, that stand in the late day dapple of desert sunshine. Oh, how it makes her want to sink forward against him, close her eyes. But instead she throws the dazzle of flirtation into her smile, reaches out to snare him by the forearm and drag him loose, and it doesn’t escape her attention, how easily he unfolds his arms, how quick he is to follow her lead.

“You don’t need a reason to stop by. Maybe I’m not supposed to tell you that after only a couple of dates, but there you go,” she says with a high, giddy laugh, because what the hell, and because _What the_ hell _, Sansa?!_

She turns towards the door as her fingers run down the inside of his wrist under the pretense of leading him inside, but when they reach the center of his palm he closes his hand and snares her, tugging her back towards him.

“Your sunglasses aren’t out _here_ ,” she starts, but then there is the loose loop of his free arm around her waist when he pulls her flush against him, the weight of his touch making her dress stick to the sweat along her ribs, up and down the plane of her belly when she steps into and stands against him.

“No, but you are,” he says.

When he sets her fingers free with the opening of his hand she lifts them to his face, has that girlish thrill when he inclines his head to kiss her. It’s a honey slathered hum up and down the length of her when his mouth opens against hers, when his free hand finds the back of her neck to hold her here in this space of his. His palm is hot on her skin, and she feels like a teenager kissing on the porch at 10pm after a date even though it’s not even close to sunset, even though this is so clearly not a boy but a man.

 

“I think your sister just hung up on me,” his father says, staring down at the phone as if it has turned into a snake and threatens to bite him.

Robb laughs from the watery confines of the swimming pool, his folded forearms anchoring him to the side of the cool decking. Dacey’s feet are a hover about a foot from his face as she suns herself, one leg bent, her toes a lazy wiggle in the late day heat. If his parents weren’t here he’d haul himself up to slide a wet hand along the curved muscle of her calf, up, up, up.

“Don’t be offended, dad, I haven’t heard Arya say goodbye over the phone in years,” he says, unfolding an arm to submerge his hand, and Dacey is a golden-skinned jump on the chaise lounge when he flicks his fingers at her. Water beads slide down her ankle, make him want to bite his lip.

“Dammit, Robb, quit it,” she says with mock indignation. She immediately cancels out her admonition by sitting up, tucking her legs beneath her and lying backwards on the chaise, on her belly facing him.

He grins, gets a whiff of coconut lotion when she rests her hand on the crown of his head, giving him the lightest of shoves.  

“It wasn’t Arya, it was Sansa,” Ned says.

Robb tears his eyes from his girlfriend, grins at the sight of his dumbfounded father as he stares at the phone before shaking his head and setting it under his chair. Ned is a Sunday morning smile when Catelyn materializes from inside the house, wearing something lightweight and gauzy that looks to Robb like a circus tent though his sisters rave and call it stylish. There are some things he just doesn’t understand about women, which is why Dacey is such a breath of fresh air. She’s guileless and straightforward, says what she means and never says _I’m fine,_ but then he supposes that’s what he should expect from his Crossfit trainer.

“It’s not like Sansa to just hang up right in your ear,” Cat says as she takes a sip from the glass of iced tea in her hand before she passes it to her husband.

“She sounded distracted. She called me asking about Rickon’s work hours, and then she went all whispery,” he says, smiling his thank you to Cat when he takes the iced tea, his hand a drift against her hip when she walks past him to sit at the pool steps with her feet in the water.

Robb smiles faintly, hopes this relationship with Dace works out better than his emotionless train wreck of a marriage to Jeyne. He wants so desperately what his parents have; solid marriage, a gaggle of kids, a foundation to build a life together.

“Whispery,” Dacey says, pulling his attention towards her, all black sunglasses and suntan smiles. “Sounds like _love_ ,” she says, breathing out the last word like she’s Marilyn Monroe.

“I’ll show you love,” he mutters, reaching out again to tug the foot of her chaise towards the pool, and she shrieks, and it only proves to egg him on. Robb tugs it again, bringing it mere inches away from the edge of the pool.

“Robb, stop it,” his mother says as she thumbs through a magazine.

He shakes his head at Dacey, a _Lucky you_ look on his face when he pushes away from the pool’s edge, hoping his expression goads her into getting into the water. He is in luck, and she is a toned-limb rise when she gets first to her knees on the lounger, then her feet on the cool deck.

“Robb, you said Ric is enjoying the job, didn’t you?” Ned asks, because his parents are clearly not seeing the delightfully wicked look on Dacey’s face, but then again, she’s got her back to them.

“Uh huh,” he says as he treads careful water in the deep end of the pool, mindful of his leg though it feels better than it has in weeks. _Water therapy,_ he thinks as Dacey feigns polite interest in the temperature of the water, her foot a cautious dip and splash. _Girlfriend therapy, more like it._

“He’s apparently not charging for his time with Shireen, at least not all of it. They’re apparently spending a lot of time together,” Ned says.

Both his parents tip their heads away when Dacey suddenly springs into the air, cannon-balling in the center of the pool, sending arcs of water in every direction. She’s a wriggle and dolphin kick as she swims underwater towards him, and the force of motion drags at her black bikini bottoms, showing him a sliver of pale, untanned skin. He hums out a grin, and she is laughing when her upturned face breaks the surface of the water.

“Spending free time with a girl, not logging in hours even when he’s with her,” she says, winding her arms around his shoulders, skin warm despite the cool water they’re both treading. “That sounds a lot like love, too,” she whispers before kissing him.

 “He’s got a girlfriend., Dace. Shows what you know,” he says against her mouth. More coconut, more sun, more, more, more.

“About love? I know plenty, Robb Stark,” and he feels a thrill when she kisses him again, doesn’t even care when she immediately shoves his head underwater.

 

He’s wearing a crisp white button down shirt and a skinny black tie that makes her think of mobsters and cigar-chewing gangsters, the warm sepia of his skin lending itself to that old-timey-photograph feel. The fact that Maynard’s Kitchen is in the remodeled old train depot downtown and has hints of vintage and throwback design all over the place, only makes it stronger, the feeling that she’s glimpsing the past. Gendry is a charming swagger behind the bar, white-teeth laughter and the toss back of his head as he plucks a bottle of gin from the top shelf, and he makes her sigh.

Arya stands at the far end of the restaurant, leaning in the glass framed doorway as she watches Gendry pour out a cocktail for a little old lady perched like a parakeet at the bar, his only customer so far, considering how early in the evening it is. The light coming through the northern wall of windows is a storm-scrubbed pale peach, a warm glow that comes from being trapped between a layer of clouds and the desert floor. It makes her want to grab his hand and drag him out of here, makes her want to go break into the pool of some apartment complex and jump in with their clothes on. It makes her want to kiss him with an ice cube in her mouth, or a fancy hat on her head like she’s Bonnie and he’s Clyde.

“Come on, son, you call that a double pour? Do you take me for a pussy?” the old woman says with a snap, and just like that, the yesteryear feeling is obliterated.

“Not at all, Mrs. Celtigar,” Gendry says, and he catches sight of Arya when he turns to fetch the bottle of Bombay, rolls his eyes with a smile before dumping another splash of gin in the highball glass of tonic.

“What’s up, Mrs. C,” Arya says as she pushes off the doorframe and fully enters the bar area, flashing her biggest grin when Shireen’s landlady starts and literally does a double take at the informal greeting.

“Who in the hell are- oh, it’s _you_ ,” she says, aiming a gnarl-knuckled finger at Arya as the latter comes to stand behind the barstool next to hers. “You, I remember, with that rude tall boy who cursed at me on my own property. You’re friends with my Shireen, came over after that fiasco she suffered.”

“Yep, that was my brother, and this is me,” she says, planting a knee in the center of the leather-topped stool to post herself up and halfway over the hammered-metal bartop. “Hey, sexy,” she says.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Gendry says, tossing a towel next to the sink below the rows of bottles behind him, turning towards her with a grin. He braces his hands on the edge of the bar, leans forward to catch the kiss she gives him.

“Oh for mercy’s sake,” Mrs. Celtigar mutters, making them both snort with laughter before Arya retreats from the attack. “It’s beyond appropriate, especially with me here trying to maintain my appetite for dinner.”

“You’re just jealous,” Arya whispers as she settles her ass onto the stool next to Mrs. Celtigar’s, who eyes her keenly as she stirs her swizzle stick in her cocktail.

“Of your young man perhaps, but not your attire,” she says with a sniff and a sip of her gin and tonic. Arya laughs, because this little old lady is literally dragging her right now for her outfit, when she looks like she stepped off the set of _Golden Girls_.

“Funny coming from you, considering you look like you could wear that lime wedge in your drink as a hat,” Arya says, and it’s true; the old bat’s in a drapey gauzy thing the color of a margarita over white pants that makes Arya think of straws sticking out of a sombrero glass. “Hey, Gendry, could you make me a gimlet?”

“Where on earth did Shireen meet you?” the older woman asks, peering over her wide framed eyeglasses.

“Through me, ma’am,” Gendry says, shaking up Arya’s drink with an amused look on his face before he leans over to catch the order of an approaching server, though he manages to sneak in another kiss when he slides over her gimlet.

“That makes more sense, then. She’s one of the sweetest, kindest young ladies I’ve ever met, and then, _well_ ,” says Mrs. Celtigar, gesturing with an up and down sweep of her hand in Arya’s direction.

“What? It’s hot outside,” she says as frowns and looks down with a shrug, seeing nothing wrong with her baby doll sundress and beat up Converses, though she supposes wearing them barefoot could offend the geriatric, and maybe sitting with one leg folded underneath her isn’t so apropos for a clean cut restaurant, but then again, _Since when have I ever given a shit?_

“That dress is short enough to see France, if you catch my drift,” she says before taking a deep, ice-on-the-teeth swallow of her cocktail.

“Oh, well that’s no big deal, I’ve got shorts on underneath,” Arya says with a grin, and to prove it she lifts her dress up nearly to her breasts, showing a pair of cutoff shorts she hasn’t bothered buttoning all the way.

To her credit, Mrs. Celtigar barks out a laugh better suited for a Pomeranian, and with her second scrutinizing glance-over and another swallow of gin, she nods.

“You know what, I think I like you,” she says, and Arya leans over to tap the edge of her martini glass against Mrs. Celtigar’s drink.

“You either like me or you hate me, there’s no in between,” she says, setting her drink down when her phone buzzes.

“Same with me, young lady. If I can even call you that,” she says with a thin lipped grin, her mango colored lipstick a pop of merriment on the cranky crab-apple of her face. Arya decides she likes her, too.

“Probably not,” Arya laughs as she answers her little brother’s call. “Rickon, what’s up?”

“Hey, are you home right now? I need to get those camo face paints you and Robb use for paintball,” he says, his voice the far away sound of someone driving with the windows down.

“I’m at Maynard’s, competing with your best friend for my man’s affections right now,” she says, grinning as Mrs. Celtigar snorts into her drink.

“She’s at work, not- wait, what?” he says, and Arya laughs.

“Nothing, never mind. Don’t bother going home, I’ve actually got them in my gym bag out in the parking lot. Can you swing by? Are you going to do paintball right now? I _just_ got a drink, or else I’d go with you,” she says, reaching over the bar to grab a maraschino cherry from the little container of them between the lemons and limes.

“No, nothing like that, but if you’re downtown, that’s perfect. I’m just down the street from you, leaving the YMCA. See you and your boyfriend in a hot minute,” he says, and then the line goes dead, her ear full of traffic and wind one second, and then silence the next.

She’s showing Mrs. Celtigar pictures of sexy movie stars on her phone when Rickon strides in, his growing-out hair still wet from what she assumes is either a shower or a swim, considering he’s dressed in jeans and a black shirt and not gym clothes, and she spins her stool towards him with a grin, her drink slopping dangerously close to the glass’s rim when she does so.

“Rickon the raccoon, hey, brother,” she says. “Stop and have a drink with me! We can paint our faces _here_ , and this lady’s too. She’s two deep already, I bet she’ll let you,” she says in a stage whisper.

Rickon frowns down at her as if she’s speaking Russian, as if she’s suggesting he strip down and dance naked on the bar, but then Mrs. Celtigar snorts from behind Arya. He lifts his eyes, and Arya laughs outright with her head thrown back to see the expression change on her little brother’s face. He’s a roll of the eyes and a step back, the fold of his arms across his chest and a muttered _Oh for fuck’s sake._

“I could say the same to you, young man, you with your horrific behavior around my Shireen. Too good for the likes of you, I say. Sweetest little thing I’ve ever known, getting my mail for me, tipping the gardener when I’m not there. She’ll go on walks with me at night sometimes, or she _did_ before you people took her away from me,” she says, wagging her finger at him. “Honestly, what she _sees_ in you,” Mrs. Celtigar mutters, and when Arya glances back at her she can see the little creature’s feet tapping merrily on the bottom rung of her stool.

“Hey, with _me_ she can see France, remember?” Arya quips, grinning at the reaction she gets before turning back to Rickon. “You want those paints?”

He’s still staring at Mrs. Celtigar with an ill-tempered look of bewilderment when Arya drags him from the bar and out to the parking lot, and the sudden heat is a punch to the coolness of inside, the chill of her drink in her hand and of the metal bar top on her wrists.

“So who are you paintballing with,” she says as she unlocks the trunk of her Nissan 300z, Robb’s old car that she secretly loves with her whole heart. “Am I about to be offended? I know it can’t be Robb, that jerk’s still healing up from his stupid injury. Fuckin’ football,” she says, leaning in to rifle through her gym bag, pulling out the plastic container of camo face paint and slapping it in Rickon’s waiting palm.

“I swear to Christ, I’m _not_ going paintballing, okay? Shireen and me, we’re uh, we’re going to go check something out is all,” he says, squinting in the dying sunlight as he looks down at the paints in his hand.

Arya grins, feels a surge of something like an epiphany coming rolling over her shoulders, but she can’t quite put a finger on it.  He thanks her with an elbow to her bare shoulder and a nod, half a smile on his face as he turns and jogs to his trucked parked on the far end of the parking lot. She watches him leave with a shake of her head, the gimlet a pleasant swim of vodka in her brain, though she smiles in earnest when he thinks to stick his head and arm out of the window, a wave of recognition and love before he pulls out of the lot onto Toole, heading down to 6th avenue where he will turn north to head home. _Baby brother,_ she thinks, wishing she had thought to ask him out to paintball, at least once since Robb was taken out of commission with his leg and had to cancel on their weekly games. _Have fun tonight._

It’s not until she’s back on her stool and flirting with Gendry that she puts two and two together, sitting here in the hustle and bustle of a popular restaurant right at nightfall, and she laughs, laughs so hard that this time she _does_ spill her drink.

“What’s into you, huh? Do I have to kick you out? It’s a long three hours I have to keep you out in the parking lot ‘til my shift ends,” Gendry says as he slides her another gimlet with one hand, pulling towards him the empty glasses a server deposits next to Arya.

“I just realized,” she says with a shake of her head, wishing Mrs. Celtigar was still here to hear it. “Rickon thought I meant _Shireen_ , when I said his best friend was competing with me. They’re _totally_ buddies now. Bran totally called it.”

 

He’s sprawled in the corner of the sofa with Jojen’s head resting on his chest as they watch an episode of _House of Cards,_ his limp and unfeeling legs a careful cross on the coffee table as if he could tell the difference, but then Jojen never skimps when it comes to the feel and the look and the experience. It’s why he’s so relaxed when there’s a knock on the door, why his fingers keep on straying in Jojen’s hair even when there is the low _ding_ of the doorbell right after.

“Shaggydog, quit it,” he says when the large black dog comes barreling down the hall from Rickon’s room, his loud barks echoing against the tile and Spartan décor of the place.

“You can get the door for once in your life,” Jojen says in his dreamy laze of a voice, his hand a sweep down Bran’s chest as he props himself up and looks down. He sighs. “Fine, _I’ll_ do it. Age before beauty, I suppose.”

Bran laughs.

“One day, that joke’s gonna get old, grandpa,” he says, using his upper body strength to hoist himself up into a more suitable position, once Jojen stands to greet their unknown guest, casually sweeping the pipe and baggie of weed under the National Geographic magazine on the coffee table.

He watches the lithe, languid way Jojen moves, like he’s underwater and doesn’t care about it, like air doesn’t mean anything. Like he’s a man walking across the mouth of a volcano and the heat can’t touch him. Bran smiles. Jojen is a silent shuffle, his lanky arm a swing when he grabs the doorknob to open the door wide and unassuming. Bran is sometimes jealous, watching the world move around him when he cannot, when the memory of running track and field in high school still hasn’t faded, when sometimes his car wreck dreams can rival Rickon’s. But not tonight, not with the mellow mood he’s in and the taste of smoky kisses still on his mouth.

“Ms. Baratheon, I presume,” Jojen says, his voice a tie between exaggeration and boredom, amusement and aloofness, and Bran’s attention is stolen from his boyfriend when Shireen walks in, Shaggydog an immediate close inspection, snuffling at her shoes as he circles her and circles her.

Oh, but she’s cute. Tiny and pert, a blue eyed thing that clasps her hands in front of her when she steps in, even wearing black skinny jeans and a tight black shirt that make her look like the world’s most polite cat burglar. Bran smiles; no wonder his little brother talks about her more and more these days. He remembers Rickon coming home after his flashback clutching a pale lilac chemise, Shaggydog an overprotective familiar at his side. They had been so worried, Bran and Jojen, when Arya and Sansa rushed in, explaining they’d been sent by Shireen for Rickon’s dog. How quickly she assessed the situation was all Rickon talked about that entire night, how close she came to the source of his panics. She’s more different than any of his other friends, and is so far a cry from Wylla Bran doubts he could even hear it.

“Hey,” she says with a smile, her scars a slight bunch from the expression. “Sorry to bug you guys, I was just um, well Rickon told me to meet him here,” she says with an embarrassed sort of smile and an aimless gesture used more to fill space than to convey anything.

“He’s not home, but I’m sure if he told you to meet him that he’ll be here soon. Have a seat,” Bran says, and she smiles her thanks as she enters the room and sits lightly in the second hand arm chair across the coffee table from the couch.

“Can I get you anything to drink?” Jojen asks over his shoulder, padding barefoot into the kitchen.

“No, thanks, we’ve got a little, well, when Ric gets here we’re off on an errand, I guess you could say,” she says, smiling as she dips her head to hide it.

“So how are you enjoying the security detail? Is he doing a good job? Is Arya trying to attack every person who looks at you twice?” Bran says, smiling when Jojen returns with two IPAs and sits snug against his side. _‘Ric’,_ he thinks with a smile. He likes the way the nickname sounds with her voice.

Shireen smiles, all sweetness and sincerity, even in the wide open spaces of her solemn eyes.

“It’s been great, I’ve felt like a movie star. Though I imagine pretty soon I won’t really need the extra attention. I’ll be moving back to my house this weekend, and nothing has really happened aside from the first instance. It just doesn’t seem necessary anymore,” she says.

“Well, I’m sorry to hear it and I’m sure the rest of us will be, too. I know Sansa and Arya have adored having you stay with them,” Bran says, and the couple of hits he took earlier make him mischievous, make him tip his head as he regards her. “Does Ric know you’re ending business with us? I know he’s really enjoyed it, I’m sure he’ll be sad to see you go.”

“After tonight’s errand, you mean,” Jojen offers.

“Of course after tonight,” Bran says.

Shireen narrows her eyes slightly, her mouth turning up in a suspicious smile as she looks from one to the other, and she opens her mouth to speak, and Bran is dying to hear what she has to say since he keeps hearing about her singular cleverness, but then Shaggy _woofs_ , noses the doorknob of the front door, and there is the sound of keys and the upward flick of the deadbolt.

“Hey, mutt,” Rickon says, squatting in the open doorway to ruffle his dog’s fur, and the three of them who are seated turn and listen to the sound of a dog license jangling and a man greeting his pet.

“We’ve got company, man,” Bran says, and Rickon starts, looking up at his brother, glancing to Jojen before his eyes flick to the right and he sees Shireen.

Before he can help himself, Rickon grins, and it does not go unnoticed by Bran.

“Hey, Shir,” he says, giving Shaggy a final pat on the side of his ribs before he stands. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah, sure,” she says with a smile as she stands as well, and they are an awkward almost-dance, as Rickon takes a step towards her and she does the same, making him halt in place before he takes a step _back_.

It is all Bran can do not to snort out a laugh.

“What are you two gonna do, rob a bank?” Jojen says, gesturing with his beer to the two of them, and it’s then that Bran sees they’re both head to toe in black.

“She’s trouble, but she’s not _that_ much trouble,” Rickon gruffs and mutters, sliding a look to her as he tosses his keys from one hand to the other.

“Excuse me? You’re the one who fell on your ass in a creek,” she says, the lightest bite to her tone and _that_ makes Bran laugh at last.

Rickon scowls, rolls his eyes, pats the dog on the head before he turns back to the open door. He uses the toe of his shoe to nudge a wandering june bug back outside.

“Come on, let’s get going, it’s a long drive across town,” he says.

“Nice to see you guys again,” Shireen says with a finger-waggle wave, tucking her hair behind her elfin ears before turning to follow Rickon outside.

“Bye, Ric,” Bran says, leaning forward to drag the pipe out from under the magazine.

“Bye, Trouble,” Jojen says, and before she closes the door they can hear Rickon bark out a laugh and say _Trouble, I like that._

“I’ll bet he does,” they say in unison.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/124012198033/a-world-alone-chapter)

The city lights are passing globes of pumpkin orange on the damp black asphalt as they drive through town, past car dealerships and natural grocery stores, past empty lots of desert scrub and tacky shambled strip malls harkening back to the 1950s. It’s a Thursday evening during the summer and the city is dead as dead can be, and the drowsy night streets lend to their mission a certain feeling of blanketed secrecy. So does the relative silence in the car, though it’s been awhile since it stopped being uncomfortable, when it’s the quiet they share just between the two of them.

 If she judged a book by its cover it might surprise Shireen to hear The Lumineers strumming away on Rickon’s truck stereo instead of something rougher and tougher, but she knows his self-adjustments by now. It’s soothing music, calm and sort of sad and the way she’s starting to see herself, but for tonight it only serves to underline just how agitated she is.

“You okay over there? You’re like a cat on a hot tin roof right now,” he says, glancing over at her when she shoots him a look.

It’s only then that she realizes that she’s crossed and uncrossed her legs a few times, that her crossed over right leg is bobbing from her left foot tap-tap-tapping in the footwell of his truck. She’s twirling her hair with one hand while she drums the nails of the other on the bench seat between them. She is a little tangle of nervous energy, a little fluster of fidgeting ballet flats and shell-pink nail polish.

“Sorry, I’ve just um, I’ve never done  _anything_  like this before,” she says to the urban scenery outside.

“Well, me either. I’ve blown shit up in other countries but I’ve never helped a girl break into her stepmother’s house to try and find an old will,” he says.

“ _New_  will,” she corrects, and now she hears now how utterly ridiculous this plan is, and she winces, sighs, slumps against the back of the bench seat.

“Fine, new will, whatever. I’ve still never done it before,” he says, and he’s a long stretch of his left arm, the drape of his wrist over the top of the steering wheel, the occasional fidget himself when he wiggles the stick shift back and forth in neutral as they idle at stoplights.

“You seem so  _relaxed_  though. Jesus, I can’t even calm down on the ride over. Do you have any gum or anything? I need something to distract me,” she says.

“Yeah, here,” he says, leaning over the seat, his arm a brief rest on her thigh as he twists the lock on the glove box, and the plastic face of it yawns open with a light tap to her knee. “Grab me one too, if that’s cool. And I guess I’m not nervous ‘cause I don’t know the woman. Plus, you know, I used to blow shit up,” he says with a chuckle that makes her smile.

Rickon straightens, lifts his arm from her leg to downshift the car as he takes a left hand turn, leaving the low light orange of Speedway for the deeper, darker streets that will guide them up into the foothills. He shifts the car into third and then fourth, and once they’re cruising along he rests his arm along the top of the back rest behind them. Shireen leans forward, peering into the dark cranny of the glove compartment as she pokes tentatively here and there, searching for gum, hoping to God it’s not peppermint.

“Ah, perfect,” she says, finding spearmint instead, and for some reason it makes her think it’s some sort of trifling good omen for the evening ahead of them. She unwraps a piece and pops it in her mouth, tosses the pack of gum back in the glove box before partially unwrapping a second piece, and she holds it out for Rickon. “Here you go,” she says, slapping shut the glove compartment.

“Awesome, thanks,” he says. He glances over at the piece of gum, shifting the truck as he slows for another turn, and with one hand on the wheel and the other on the stick shift he leans over, snagging the piece of gum from the wrapper with his teeth.

Shireen stares at the wrapper still in her fingers, flicking her eyes up at him with what she realizes a moment too late must be a look of prudish incredulity, because when he glances at her, jaws working as he chews, Rickon bursts out laughing. The cab explodes with it, that deep bellied noise she’s really only heard once or twice from him, and it makes her think of fireworks and how they make her heart beat faster.

“Jesus, the look on your face,” he says, chuckling to himself as he slows the truck for an upcoming stoplight. “Wylla and I , we-“ and just like that he halts himself, pauses, doesn’t keep talking until the light changes and he’s trundling the truck through the dark desert intersection. Rickon clears his throat. “Force of habit, sorry,” he says.

“No, no, no, it’s no big deal, don’t worry about it,” she says, wadding and rolling the wrapper into a little ball. “But you forgot your trash,” she says, flicking it so it bounces off his cheek when he tilts his head away a moment too late.

The cab of his truck feels crowded all of a sudden with the mention of his sea nymph of a girlfriend, all brightly dyed hair and lollipop smiles, laidback confident grins that Shireen will never be able to return because it just doesn’t come that easily to her. Rickon seems as consumed by the same thoughts, considering the way he’s working his gum like he’s got a vendetta against it. Shireen chews her own, lets the mint flavor flood her tastebuds, but it still doesn’t keep her from opening her stupid mouth.

“Okay, so can I ask something personal?”

Rickon chuckles, shrugs a shoulder as he pulls onto Shireen’s old street, shutting off the lights of the truck when he comes to a slow stop about three houses down. He keeps the engine running so they can enjoy the A/C but he turns off the music, puts the truck in neutral and yanks on the emergency brake. With a sigh he undoes his seatbelt and turns so his back is against the car door, and she follows suit, unlatching her own belt before she twists to face him.

“Shireen Baratheon, asking the hard questions, huh,” he says, though he pulls a face as he says it.

It makes her laugh, and she toys with the ends of her hair, fans them out and pretends to trim them with the scissors of her fingers. He is silent as she averts her eyes, as she busies herself so she can try to find her words. It’s quiet here, in this cocoon of his truck cab, quiet save for the soft  _whush_  of air conditioning and a creak when he lifts his foot and rests it on the seat between them. He’s in black hiking boots under the dark of his jeans, and he watches her and waits. When she lifts her eyes to his, he is patience, is fully prepared –  _Maybe hoping –_  to wait all night for her to finally open her mouth, if she so dares. And she does.

“Okay, so I have to ask, because I don’t want to like, oh I don’t know. Intrude, or whatever but, um. Doesn’t your girlfriend like, wonder where you are at night? Where is she tonight? I’ve only met her once but to be honest I sort of figured she’d want to be a part of something as crazy as this.”

Shireen watches him, waits for his expression to change, and she counts how many times she chews her gum -  _Eleven -_ before he exhales through his nose, lowers his eyes and shakes his head.

“My girlfriend doesn’t wonder where I’m at because I don’t have a girlfriend anymore. Though you’re a pretty good judge of character; Wylla would love this shit,” he says with a huff, tipping his head back against the window as he exhales, shaking his head.

“I’m so sorry, Rickon. I really liked- well, she- she seemed pretty cool,” she says finally, because she’s not a liar but she’s not a shit talker either. When he doesn’t respond she frowns, gazing down at his boot as she plays with her hair.  _Curiosity killed the cat._  She looks up at him. “How long ago?”

“Oh, man, like a week ago? I don’t know, though, in a weird way it seems like it’s been a lot longer. We uh, hmm,” he says, closing his eyes as he rubs his hand across his face. “It feels like it’s been longer, though. We were broken a long time before we broke up, if that makes any sense.”

“Why?” she asks, tucking one leg beneath her as she rests against the passenger door.

He hums, seems sad but calm about it, relieved almost, and unlike discussing his PTSD and his panic attacks, he does not look reluctant to discuss it. Rickon only needs time to find the words, and because she gets that she waits, rolls the gum across her tongue and pushes it against her teeth.

“I’m not the guy she fell in love with,” he says, glancing down at the steering wheel as he picks at a tear in the plastic coating covering it. “I’m just the leftover pieces of him, I guess,” he says, tonguing his gum between his teeth before pulling it back in his mouth, snapping it two or three times between his jaws.  

It breaks her heart to hear him say it, to watch him wrestle with that notion, one she thinks is utter bullshit. She has never seen war and never fought in one, but she’s got her own demons and her own hauntings to deal with.

“You’re not just broken pieces, Rickon,” she says quietly, sticking her hand in front of the vent to feel the cold air slide between her fingers.

“Please, Shireen, you don’t—” he starts with a sigh of exasperation, but she shakes her head and cuts him off.

“I know I didn’t know you back then, but I think you’re fine just the way you are. You may be different, but the way I look at it, there are some people who live their whole lives as the same person they were when they were 18 years old. Most of us, though, we change, and we  _should_  change. Change, grow, evolve, whatever. I’m sure the real Rickon on the inside is still the same. It’s just that, now, the way he- the way  _you_  come out has changed.”

The truck is as dark as the sleepy street around them, but she can tell he is looking at her head on with an elbow resting against his bent knee, though the features of his face are cloaked, and it gives her the courage to go on.

“When I messed my face up, the bubbly little girl changed. All the friends and party invitations went away, and suddenly I was all by myself stuck between two parents who didn’t love each other. I lost part of me when my mom bailed, and I buried even more of me with my dad. That doesn’t mean there isn’t humor in me, or that all my love is gone, or that I’m less of who I could have been. It’s all still in there, it just, you know,” she says, losing her steam and sight of the direction she wanted to go.  Shireen sighs, rests her head on the window, tilting her face to look up the street towards her old house.

“It’s harder to find,” he says after a few moments, clearing his throat. “I haven’t uh, I haven’t told anyone else about Wylla, so if you could just keep that one close to your chest, I’d appreciate it,” he says.

Shireen nods, because she hears what’s hidden there, one of those hard to find things that Rickon plucks out and hands over to her; it is a sign of friendship, as clear as a receipt, as serious as a pinky swear. She smiles to the desert suburban yards outside.  _But satisfaction brought it back._

 

“Here, come stand over here, I can’t see you when you’re in the street,” he says, walking towards one of the few streetlights on this snake belly curving street.

It’s a wealthy neighborhood, tucked up against the foothills that drape like skirts at the base of the Catalinas, all multimillion dollar homes with their living room windows winking like lights on a dark Christmas tree, and to keep the light pollution down for all the observatories up in the mountains the streets are mostly dark. It’s cooler up here but not by much, and the minute or so he’s spent standing outside of the truck has already made him start to sweat.

He’s got the little plastic palette of face paints Arya loaned him in the palm of his hand, and as he walks past the truck he slides his fingers down through the three shades. He turns to wait for Shireen, uses the time to smear the green, brown and black paints from the top of his nose down the plane of his cheek beneath first his right eye and then his left. Repeating the process until his face is more or less covered.

“You have to be  _kidding_ me,” Shireen hisses when she comes around the front of the truck, her shoes a lightweight scuff where desert meets asphalt. “I’m not wearing that stuff. It makes- I mean, you look like a  _hooligan_ ,” she says with a giggle that she covers with her hand.

Rickon rolls his eyes.

“I look like a hooligan because we’re doing hooligan things, Little Miss Trouble, or did you forget that you called me up one night asking me to help break into your dad’s house? That’s hooligan shit right there, so maybe  _you’re_  the hooligan,” he says, pointing at her with a camo-smeared finger.

“Say ‘hooligan’ one more time,” she says, her voice an up and down from the ill-suppressed laughter that’s bubbling up out of her.

“Hooligan,” he says, and now it no longer sounds like a real word – though it was never a word he’d regularly say to begin with – and then he laughs with her.

She shushes him, swallows down the laughter with an sigh as she steps into him, peering down at the palette in his hand before gingerly pressing two fingertips into the cream paints. He shushes her when she bitches about the texture, complains about her pores or some other nonsense, tells her to hurry up with it before someone looks outside and thinks they’re doing a drug deal. She paints her face like it’s with watercolors on canvas, as if she’s about to go strut down a catwalk somewhere, taking her sweet little time with dabs here and swipes there, and finally Rickon loses his patience.

“Oh for Chrissakes, come here,” he says, pushing his fingers deep into the paints before he slaps shut the palette and pockets it.

Rickon holds her by the chin with his left hand, and her eyes widen enough that he can see the whites of them when he slathers the stuff on her scarred cheek, nose to jaw like he did on himself.

“Rickon, please,” she murmurs, the muscles of her chin working under his grasp as she speaks.

The light from above is enough to cast a dull glow on her upturned face, and he can see her frown, is about to lecture her on getting over herself and her pores when he remembers. He pauses, looking up from the fingertipped swipe of color down the left side of her face.

“I’ve already touched them and I’ve already told you they don’t mean shit, Shir, so just let it go, okay?” He nods when she nods, takes it as a sign to keep on going, and he lets go of her chin, paints the other side of her face to match.

“You’ve got that stuff all over your mouth, by the way,” she says, wrinkling her painted nose when he licks the side of his upper lip. “Ew, gross, don’t  _eat_ it, Jesus. It’s- no, not- yeah, right there, on the bottom,” she says, pointing to his mouth a moment before she sighs and drags her thumb across his lower lip, once, twice, almost to the point of pain because the cream paint is so thick.

It is oddly intimate, reminds him of his mother or maybe Sansa when he was still in middle school and was always covered in dirt. Rickon watches her face as she cleans him up, the crease between her eyebrows, the shape of her mouth when it parts. He thinks they’re like a couple of monkeys out here, grooming themselves in the dark of night, but then he thinks of  _Hooligan_  and he grins, can’t help but huff out a laugh as the stupid word runs itself in a circle in his head. It makes her stop her administrations, give him a good natured glare as she throws her hands in the air and turns on her heel.

“Suit yourself, pal, wear it like lipstick if you want,” she says.

He rubs his mouth with the back of his hand, watches her and her cute little bebop walk, but then he remembers where she’s headed, and he jogs after her, takes her lightly by the forearm to pull her to his side and somewhat behind him.

“You forgetting why you asked me here?” he whispers, looking down at the black shape of her now they are out of the streetlight’s orange glow. “I mean, if you want to head the mission then by all means, soldier, press on.”

“Oh, shut up,  _hooligan,_ ” she murmurs. “Like you’d know which house it is.”

“Lead the way then, Trouble,” he says, and he  _oofs_  when she whacks him in the stomach with her arm.

Stannis Baratheon’s house is as much a marvel as his neighbors’, a muted shade of adobe to blend into the desert, and while Rickon appreciates the effort it does strike him as silly, spending so much money on a house that tries to be invisible. The porch light is on as well as a few accent lights in the yard, under palo verdes that look like they’re made of ice in such white, crystalline light, up against agave plants that look like something witches make with their curving, twisting, spiny fronds stretching skyward. They stand at the bottom of the driveway by the stucco-encased mailbox, and Shireen tugs on his sleeve. Rickon lowers his head, slouches his body as she gets on her toes to whisper in his ear.

“I think she’s out of the house,” she says, her breath a warm gust of spearmint against the side of his face. “They’d never leave the porch light on unless they were out and were going to come home after dark.”

Rickon nods, taps her shoulder, turns his face towards hers.

“Let’s go around to the back in case anyone’s watching,” he says, and he feels the sift of her hair against his face when she nods. When they draw apart, fine strands of it cling to the paint on his cheek, and he has to brush them away to free himself of her.

They stick to the driveway, which is paved as black as their clothes, and a part of him loves it, the feeling of being back on task, like he’s dropped himself in the past, an adrenaline-pumped vat of memory. His heart beats harder than when they were talking in the truck though there is none of the sickly roil of dread in his gut like in his dreams. Rickon almost misses the weight of his gear and the heaviness of an M16 in his hands, the sweaty security of a helmet on his head. As it is, he’s able to run far easier now, which they do when they pass the spotlight shining down above the three car garage, skirting its pool of light as they push through Mexican birds of paradise and thick Texas ranger shrubs.

They find a corner to duck into where the garage butts up against the house and they stand nearly toe to toe behind a gnarled old mesquite tree. It all feels very exciting and very stupid, and he thinks definitely he’s going to charge her for  _this_  evening. It’s definitely calling to action all of his past experiences, at the very least falling into the category of working.

“Okay,” she says breathlessly, pushing her bangs away from her eyes as she looks at him, “please don’t get mad, but I just realized I didn’t bring my key.”

“Are you fucking  _kidding me_?” he hisses, lowering his face to glare at her. “Please tell me there’s one hidden under a rock or something.”

“No, but- _but,_ ” she says, snagging the sleeve of his shirt and yanking him back to her when he steps back to scoff with exasperation, “I can totally get inside. I just need you to boost me up.”

“Boost you?” he says, baffled and irritated, craning his neck like an idiot to stare at the tall roof of the garage.

“Yes, boost me up, but not there, over here,” she says, sliding her hand from the grip on his shirt down to his own, her palm a snug fit inside his own, and she tugs him out from their secret little spot.

They cross the yard while keeping close to the house, and through various windows he can catch glimpses of Shireen’s life. It’s all very expensive looking, very austere, very sterile. _It looks cold,_ he thinks as they pass by a sliding glass door that leads into a kitchen. Despite the heat outside and the warm glow of an accent light over the counter, all he thinks is that it’s _cold_ , and he wonders how someone so nice came from this place.

She positions him like a chess piece when they’re standing at the part of the split level house where the roof is a low shelf, glancing up and assessing, scooting him back, pulling him to the left, but finally he snaps at her.

“Give me your goddamned foot already,” he says, hunching over as he cups his hands in anticipation of her weight.

“Fine, you grump,” she whispers, her hands two grips on his shoulders as she does as he bids.

He grunts when she’s up, staggers slightly as he remasters this new addition to his mass, but it all evens out when she grabs onto the eave to balance herself. _Fuck,_ he grits out when she shifts and stands on his shoulders with first one foot and then both. He grips both of her ankles for added structure and support, feels her tendons as she flexes her calves, lifting up on her tiptoes. Soon enough she’s off of him, a spider-girl crawl on the flat roof over the kitchen and living room. She stands, wipes her hands on the thighs of her jeans before she peers over the edge.

“Just sit tight a minute, I’ll let you in,” she says.

She’s goody-two-shoes and little miss manners, escorts old ladies and tips gardeners, is quiet and respectable and likely prides herself on all those things and more, but Rickon watches as she jimmies open an upstairs window with finesse, with expert precision that makes him wonder if this isn’t the first time she’s snuck in or out of this house. It makes him grin.

He paces outside as she creeps through the house, pictures with his mind’s eye her journey. Through a spare bedroom or a bathroom, whatever window it was she crawled through, down the stairs in a dark house. When he imagines her walking towards him he turns, looks through the sliding glass door to see her sprint his way on her toes, her hair a bounce, her fingers quick as she unlocks the door. Rickon feels an odd sense of relief to clap his eyes on her, to know she’s all right even though the house is empty save for her. He tells himself it is because this stepmother of hers is a nightmare, tells himself Mel has already threatened her a couple of times, thinks he might be lying to himself.

“All right, come on,” she says when she pushes open the door, pulling him in by the sleeve. She looks like a soot-covered street urchin with her face paint and black clothes, with her tiny stature and big eyes. “I have no idea how long she’ll be gone, so let’s hurry up.”

He follows her in silence, all careful tread though they’re alone here. It is a place of white tile floors and thick area rugs that sink luxuriously beneath his weight, fine art on the walls and not a speck of dust to be seen. When she flicks on the light, the office they find themselves in is just as stately and stern, though with a more masculine touch that hasn’t been disturbed though her father has been dead almost six weeks. Rickon gazes at the wall of bookshelves and leather bound tomes as Shireen makes a beeline for the desk, sitting in her father’s chair as she pulls open desk drawers.

“I’m sure she’s been through all this stuff, but there’s a chance she overlooked something,” she says.

He turns to watch as she riffles through file folders, the tip of her tongue a probe in the corner of her mouth as she concentrates, her eyes a back and forth dart as she speed reads. Rickon smiles, returns his attention to the shelves. He pulls books out at random on the off chance something is tucked between them, and the grandiose state of this house has him half expecting a secret passageway to swing open if only he pulls the right book. After a few minutes of this he grows discouraged because of how many books there are, and he feels like useless dead weight here, finally comes to stand behind her chair.

“Any luck?” he says, leaning over to look at the papers in her hands, to see the neat boxy penmanship of her father. It is strange to see this little glimpse of a man he will never meet, of a man who is buried in the earth. _Poor girl,_ he thinks, _it’s gotta be so weird for her right now._

“None. It’s all old taxes, past utility bills, just basic ass boring stuff,” she says, glancing back at him with a sigh.

“Check the top drawer instead, maybe we need to look for a flash drive instead of a piece of paper,” he says, reaching over her shoulder to pull open the center drawer.

There’s a sweet smell here in her proximity, that utterly feminine smell of shampoo and lotion, and before he can help himself he inhales, his eyes closing half-mast for a flickering moment. Rickon has always been a tactile person, even before the grounding techniques his PTSD brought into his life, and there is a sudden urge to touch her hair, to sift his fingers through it and find the words to describe it. He clears his throat and stands straight, pulling himself from her presence and the real possibility of a surprise erection, distracts himself from the crazy ass place his thoughts just went to by staring in the open drawer.

Fountain pens and paper clips, a small leather notebook and a neat stack of rubber bands in a little wooden cubby, and not so much as stray pencil shavings or a discarded post it note clutter up the impeccably tidy drawer. He moves to her side, squats down beside her to look through the row of drawers on the right side of the desk, but it’s just more bland order, the vestiges of a tidy life that ended too soon.

“Goddammit,” Shireen says with not a little venom. “I really hoped there’d be _something._ It’s not _fair,”_ she says, pushing shut the central drawer, sitting back so hard in the wheeled chair that it rolls back a few inches.

“If he knew to hide something from his psycho wife then he would’ve actually hidden it,” Rickon says, trying to be a bigger help than a hair-sniffing creep. He pushes Shireen back away from the desk with a hand to the seat by her thigh, comes forward on his knees to peer under the desk. “Pay dirt,” he says when he runs his hands on the underside of the drawer and feels something taped up there.

“What, what is it, let me see,” she says, her voice in his ear as she drops down beside him, her shoulder a bump against his when she tries looking under the desk with him.

“Hang on, it’s- it feels like keys,” he says as he rips the duct tape off, and sure enough, they have that house key jingle to them when they fall to the floor and Shireen scoops them up.

“’Storm’s End’? What’s that?” he says when she sits on the floor beside him, turning over the keys in her hand to reveal a plastic ball-like keychain with those words on it. The keys are small, jagged-toothed things that remind him of his locker key for the gym.

“I have no idea,” she says, leaning back to tuck the keys in the front pocket of her jeans. “I’ve never seen them before and I’ve never heard of Storm’s End before either.”

Rickon picks up the strip of tape and balls it up, stuffs it in his pocket when he stands. Shireen holds out her hand and he wordlessly accepts it, flexing his thighs and bicep when he helps pull her to her feet.

“Thanks,” she breathes as she gazes up at him, all wide eyed innocence with her face painted up like a criminal, cheeks black as her hair, scars obscured and barely discernable. He finds that he misses them, that she is simply not herself without them. _That doesn’t mean there isn’t humor in me, or that all my love is gone, or that I’m less of who I could have been,_ he remembers. _No,_ he thinks. _No it doesn’t._

“Anytime, Trouble,” he says.

Their hands lift in unison to free the strands of her hair that are stuck in her face paint but Shireen’s fingers get there first, and he watches the slow draw of them with his hand a hover near her face, watches her watch him, her eyes a drop from his eyes to his mouth. She smiles, bites her lip, and it’s then that he realizes he still has her hand in his from helping her off the floor.

“You’ve still got paint on your mouth,” she murmurs.

 Rickon rubs his thumb across his lower lip, glances down at the pad of it to see a slight smudge of black. He grins and shrugs as he brings his gaze back to her.

“I’m no makeup artist,” he says, and his grin falls into something more serious when her hand leaves her hair to make the short journey up towards his face.

It is an identical gesture to the one she made outside, trying to wipe him clean, but electrified all the more for the light they stand in now, for the way he can see her looking at him. He hasn’t been looked at like that for a long time now, not even by Wylla; it’s flattering regardless of the person giving it, but there’s something about it being Shireen that he likes. _I think you’re fine just the way you are_ takes another stroll through his thoughts, nudging away the other things that live there, dark painful self-doubtful things he uses to wound himself when he can’t sleep at night. Shireen sucks in a breath when her thumb sweeps across his lip and she brushes the tip of his tongue, and it’s such a small, coy, trembly little sound that he grins.

But there is the swing of headlights through the office window that distracts him, and he’s sorry to tear his eyes away from her, sorrier still to realize that someone is pulling up the driveway.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” he says.

 

Her heart goes from the jackrabbit flit and flutter of something exhilarating, erotic, something teasing and fleeting, something precious and rare, to the terrifying pound and wave-crash panic that fills her ears with the sound of her own pulse. Shireen immediately darts from behind the desk, hand still in Rickon’s as she yanks him out of the office and through the house towards the kitchen and back door.

“How do we lock it behind us?” she says when Rickon yanks open the sliding door, and her voice is reedy and thin and high, doesn’t sound like her at all, she is _that_ scared of being discovered by Mel.

“We don’t,” he says, slamming it shut behind him when they both sprint through the doorway.

The transition from the cool air in the house to the muggy heaviness outside makes her feel clammy and borderline nauseated, and she almost loses her footing when she tries dragging Rickon across the yard and back towards the truck and he doesn’t budge. Instead he tugs her towards their little corner behind the mesquite tree, pulling her around his body and pressing her back against the plaster and adobe of the house. It’s a cat’s tongue grit against her shoulders when he steps into her, a long-bodied press that pins her to the house, and she realizes with lightheaded comfort that he’s hiding her, protecting her, putting himself between her and the threat of discovery and the consequences of it.

“Shh, it’s okay, I’ve got you,” he says, a whispered confirmation of her suspicions, “but we can’t leave right now. She’s still in the driveway. Listen,” he says, and in their dark ensconcement she can see him turn his head with his finger pressed to his lips.

Sure enough she can just make out the low purr of the Cadillac sedan right before it’s shut off, and she stares up at Rickon, horror and fear a slosh of nerves in her belly, as she hears first one and then two car doors slam shut. She feels like an idiot for wanting to just bolt right out there, especially now she knows they don’t even outnumber the intruder. _Wait, I’m the intruder,_ she thinks, though the way Mel dropped into her and her dad’s lives all those years ago makes her wonder at that.

“All right, let’s go,” Rickon says, dropping his hand from his face and turning back to her. “I just heard the front door open and close.”

She’s got to hand it to him because she heard nothing, but then she supposes he’s got his years in the military to thank for his attention to detail. Shireen wonders what sorts of missions he’s been on, when he takes her by the hand and hustles in a crouched position around the side of the house, when he pulls her against his side as they creep across the top of the driveway. He uses the car as a shield, a barrier between themselves and the far side of the house, but once they pass it he stands.

“Time to bail,” he whispers, adjusting his grip on her hand, and their arms stretch to their full length as he takes off at full speed and she does her best to keep up.

Her shoes slap the asphalt as they tear down the driveway and the street towards his truck, and she has that pell-mell feeling that she could trip and go crashing to her knees, that wild-with-excitement way of running when she was a little girl, though right now it is pure adrenaline-spiked terror that inspires such a reckless gait. Rickon only parked three houses down but it feels impossibly far away, and she is completely winded by the time he’s pulling out his keys, slowing his pace to unlock the truck, and when he slides his hand from hers to open the passenger side door she realizes they’ve been holding hands since he helped her to her feet in her dad’s office.

“Are you okay? You’re okay,” he says, an ask and answer he takes control of after giving her a quick up and down assessment.

“Yeah,” she says. _I’ve got you,_ she thinks. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

She climbs in the truck and he slams the door shut before jogging around the truck to his side, and she half expects him to jump and slide across the hood like they do in movies, but she supposes her imagination is running away with her from the fantastical sort of idiocy they’ve just done. It ran away with her in the office, when he licked her thumb and she had the wild notion that he did it on purpose.

“Let’s get the _fuck_ out of here,” Rickon says when he literally hops up into the truck, shutting the door and turning the key in the ignition in one fell swoop.

“Yes, please,” she says, letting her head thunk back against the top of the bench seat, staring up at the ceiling as he puts the truck in first gear.

He makes a U-turn, driving partly in someone’s yard as he does so, and they do not speak, and the cab of the truck is full of the sounds of their panting as they try and catch their breath, as they let the giddy fear smooth out. Tucson sprawls out in front of them as they drive out of the foothills, a low lying stretch of city lights that fills the valley floor, a puddle of light that butts up against the edges of three mountain chains. The Santa Rita, Catalina and Tucson Mountains rise up to the left, right and back of them, towering shapes of blackness that divide the world into starry sky and the manmade glitter of streetlights below it. Shireen focuses on that to avoid thinking of her stepmother, uses the surrounding scenery to calm herself down just as Rickon uses the cigarette he lights now. She smiles when he takes a long inhale and passes the cigarette to her, and she takes it without question, sucks in a drag that she exhales once she rolls down her window halfway.

“Well _that_ was fucking intense,” he says, and it’s the understatement of the century, and because of that she laughs.

“No shit, Sherlock,” she says with a sighing gust of a chuckle, gazing at the cherry of his cigarette before taking another drag and passing it back to him. The brush of his fingers makes her think about that moment in the office, and she hugs herself to hide the shiver it gives her. “Or should I say Hooligan,” she says.

“After tonight I think Hooligan is a pretty good fit, don’t you,” he says, glancing to her, and the murkiness of his camo paint can’t hide his grin, and the cigarette paints his laughter in plumes of smoke as they both laugh together.

He insists she come in and have a drink and another cigarette once they’re back at his house, and she’s grateful that Bran and Jojen have disappeared from their wry and dry good-humored sprawl on the sofa, because it means they won’t have to explain the face paint. It takes her two washes with dish soap to get the crap off but finally it’s gone for the most part; Rickon pours them vodkas with Sprite with the faintest of green tinges on his cheeks, with a brown smudge that follows the sharp line of his jaw, and they sit in his backyard as Shaggydog trots back and forth and marks his territory.

He’s laughingly reliving her climbing up on the low roof to unlock the window when her pocket buzzes with a text, and she pins her cigarette between her lips when she pulls out her phone, but it drops to the brick patio beneath her when she opens her mouth to gasp.

“What’s wrong?” he says, all frown and concern, scooting his chair closer to hers to peer over her arm and look at the screen , finally plucking the phone from her fingers because they’re shaking so hard he cannot read the words.

**Mel:** You left the back door unlocked and Stannis’s office light on. I expected better from you, Shireen.  

“Jesus Christ, what a creepy bitch,” he says, closing out of the message before tossing the phone back to her lap. “Are you going to text her back?”

“I think I’m going to throw up is what I’m going to do,” she says with a shudder. Her dad’s keys are in her pocket and she wonders if they were even worth it.  

“She can’t know for sure that it was you,” he says. “She may suspect you but there’s no proof.” He braces his forearms against his knees as he sits forward towards her, still frowning. “You okay?”

Shireen nods, stares at her cigarette before picking it up and taking another drag, picks up her drink and swallows a good third of it before she answers him. “The only thing that sucks is that it doesn’t really matter if she doesn’t have proof. She thought I _might_ have had a copy of the will, and she trashed my freaking house because of it. Now if she thinks I’m striking back, who knows what the hell she’ll do.”

Rickon _hmms_ at that, and they finish their smokes in silence as they both watch Shaggydog scratch himself behind the ear. He stretches when he stands, and his yawn is a disappointment to her, because the last thing she wants is to get in her dark car and drive alone to Sansa and Arya’s house downtown. She could use the pretense of security detail to keep him around, but they really aren’t doing that anymore. Added to that is how their friendship is a new one, and she doesn’t think they know each other well enough to call in a favor as a friend. It’s why she smiles with relief when he rattles the ice in his glass and looks over at her.

“I’m going to make myself another, you want one? I feel a need for late night TV, and it always pairs so nicely with a stiff drink.”

“That sounds perfect,” she says, standing and following him and Shaggy when they head back in the house.

The vodka is a calming mind-numbing buzz in her veins and the first season of Workaholics a perfect, giggling distraction. They kick their shoes off and sit in friendly proximity to one another on the sofa, Rickon’s arms folded across his chest and his long legs stretched out so his feet rest on the coffee table, while Shireen sits tailor style with her drink in one hand and her phone in the other. The television and the drink are _good_ , wonderful things that soothe her, and so is his company, she realizes with a strange flip of her stomach, but they cannot keep her from checking her phone, over and over. She rereads Mel’s text, ponders a response, fears another message.

“Goddammit, Shir, give me that thing,” he says when he catches her looking at the message again. “You’re gonna make yourself go all cross-eyed,” he says with a gruff sort of grunt as he unfolds an arm and snatches her phone from her hand. Rickon sits up and tosses it into the armchair across the coffee table from them, settles back down with his head resting against the back of the sofa. “There, that’s better.”

“Well screw you too, Hooligan,” she mutters, slouching like a surly kid when he grins at her.

“Trouble, Trouble, Trouble,” he says.

They laugh, and it is the last time they speak before Shireen falls asleep with her head tipped towards him, her neck a craning stretch that is alleviated when he moves at some point. She has the cap of his shoulder for a pillow and the soft rub of his t-shirt when she adjusts, has the weight of his head when it tips to rest against the crown of her own.

 

 


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/124720520843/a-world-alone-chapter-9)

Dreams roll through him like a marble through oil, all slick and indefinable save for whorls and shapes and the deep gouge of feelings they bring with them. There is the low drip drop voice of a woman and the heavy blanket of a summer evening, there are things that make him pant with fear and anticipate the whistle of bullets, there is sorrow and pain and regret. And there is the sift of something soft and a warm weight over his heart like it’s helping to keep it in place, something that tugs on him to sleep, sleep, sleep, but it is stolen from him with the flare of an explosion that screams wake up, wake up, wake up.

He does with a shudder and a start, and sensations begin to line up single file for nametags and identities, so Rickon checks them off one by one. He is on his back on the sofa, his neck is an unnatural bend against the arm rest, his right wrist is draped on the floor and his hand is asleep. He makes two fists, has pins and pricks and tingles to the one and that soft sift of hair to the other. Rickon frowns with his eyes still closed, ticks off the other feelings waiting in line.

There is a blanket over he legs and the weight of a body wedged between him and the back of the sofa. It is the smaller shape and curve of a woman, and for a moment he thinks it’s Wylla, come sneaking in at some tiny morning hour, but when he tips his head to the left and inhales, when he sweeps his hand into and through to the ends of her hair, there is no incense and smoke, no sandalwood or tangle. Instead it all smooth, it is the smell of berries and cream and flowers, a mingled scent he now knows. It’s one that sets him at ease, perhaps for the familiarity of it or the way it simply leaves his mind alone, free as it is from memories. He smiles and breathes in, breathes out, sleep already at the beckon for him to come back.  _Okay, sure,_ he seems to say, but then there is a dull  _thud_ and his brother’s grunted  _Goddammit_ that bring him back and make him open his eyes, blink them twice before he closes them again.

“You’d better hurry, B, he’s waking up,” someone murmurs above him, and this time when he opens his eyes he scowls. Jojen is standing behind his head, his downturned face an upside down smile as he gazes at Rickon. “Good morning, sunshine,” he whispers.

 “No kidding, he’s really still asleep?” Bran says, and when Rickon tips his head to the right, lifting his still tingling right hand to rub at his eyes, he sees his brother wheel in with a look of delighted surprise on his face. “I’ll be damned, Ric, you made it ‘til morning. When did you guys fall asleep?”

“Uh,” he says with a sleep-cracked voice, buying for time because while he knows the answer to the question he also knows now that it’s Shireen here with her head on his chest and a leg thrown over him, that he’s got his arm draped over her shoulders with his hand in her hair.

It is a bewildering feeling where he isn’t sure if he’s pinned or pinning, captive or captor, and he doesn’t know how he feels about it, either.  _Flowers and cream, or is it berries and cream, or—_ Rickon gets a grip on himself, clears his throat quietly because he is unsure if he wants her to wake up or keep on sleeping. He thinks he knows the answer, though, and it’s  _strange._

“Midnight or a little after,” he says finally, turning his head ever so slightly to look down at her.

There is the black of her bangs that slipped against his chest, finally revealing the pale sweep of her forehead and the arch of her eyebrows. She has her hand half tucked between her face and his ribs, and her left cheek is an upturned exposure of scars he can see plain as day now that all the face paint is washed off.

Jojen gives a low whistle. “Midnight, really? I got up to turn off the television when it woke me up at four,” he says. “I figured you had just dropped off. Well done, Rickon.”

“We should thank Shireen when she’s awake,” Bran says.

“Why, what time is it?” Rickon says, pulling his gaze from Shireen to his brother as he checks the phone resting in his lap.

“It’s past eight in the morning, brother,” Bran says, glancing up with a happy look to Jojen when his boyfriend rests a hand on his shoulder. They’re grinning like parents on prom night.

“ _What_?” he says, jerking with a flexing of his abs as he sits up with his right elbow a dig into the cushion beneath him. Eight hours straight is not just setting a new record; it’s literally doubling it with time to spare. He has not slept this long in one go in over seven months, not even with Shaggydog there to calm him down.

“Shh, settle down, boy,” Jojen says with a hiss, gesturing with his free hand towards Rickon’s shoulder, and then like rats off a sinking ship they abandon the room, one a long legged hustle, the other an expert back-up and push out of the room.

Too late Rickon realizes his mistake, and there is the brush and reach of Shireen’s splayed fingers across his chest, a murmured muffle against his t-shirt as she starts to slide off of him. Instinctively he tightens his arm around her as he looks back at her, pulls her back up and half on top of him as if it were some deep dark ravine she was falling into instead of a sofa cushion mere inches below. His fingers are tangled in her hair and he sweeps them out, the lightest of drags that pulls the length of it up and away before it falls back, and as if in response she squeezes her hand into a fist, his t-shirt a tug into her palm, and then she lifts her head.

“Oh my god,” she says.

She looks up and around, and when she hoists herself to half roll onto her stomach and look back at Rickon, Shireen gasps. Her fingers open and she releases that little fist of his shirt, her hand darting away from him like he’s a snake. It shouldn’t surprise him, not given her mortified look when he was so foolish as to lick her thumb; what  _does_  surprise him is his disappointment in her reaction.

“Rickon, I am- oh my god, I am so sorry,” she says. “I guess I nodded off.”

He scoots his body away from her when he feels the wriggle of her pinned arm and the purchase of her hand against the sofa, and she props herself up inch by slow inch as she squirms free from him.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, grunting as he peels himself from their makeshift cocoon and the weight of what he assumes is Jojen’s well-intended 4am blanket. “I’m the one who should be sorry, I fell asleep after you, I should’ve just woken you up,” he says. It’s a lie, because he has no idea when either of them drifted off _, But the look on her face_   _right now sucks,_  he thinks.

“Okay, but,” she says, a start and a stop when he shakes his head.

“Cut it out, Shir, it’s no big deal,” he says, turning and dropping his feet to the floor. “I can pass out anywhere these days, if anyone’s gonna understand couch sleep it’s me.”

They sit in silence a moment as behind them in the kitchen Jojen and Bran do their daily morning dance of sidestep and wheel-around, every slap and clap of cabinet door a signal of where Bran is in the kitchen, since the only thing they all keep in the top shelves now are Halloween decorations, old textbooks and a couple of bongs. Shireen sits with her feet curled under her as she combs her hair with her fingers, pulling out tangles he knows that aren’t there. Rickon turns his head this way and that with a rub to the nape of his neck as he works out a kink that only eight hours of sleep could give him, closes his eyes and sighs, lets his head hang as he stretches the muscles along his spine.

“Are you okay?” she asks, and he huffs at that, shakes his head no though he means yes.

“I’m fine, just all stoved up from the uh, you know,” he says, still groggy and out of sorts from so much fucking  _sleep._  He gestures, half twists his torso to slap his makeshift pillow. “Arm rest,” he says.

“I probably smooshed you too, huh,” she says, and after all the crazy shit they went through last night she is  _shy_  now. Rickon looks up at her, and her expression is all regret and sorry eyebrows that pinch together above the bridge of her nose. “I’m sorry, Rickon. Like, you know, you  _just_  broke up with Wylla, and here I am sprawled out all over you like—”

“Don’t worry about me and don’t worry about Wylla,” he says with half a snap, hauling himself to his bare feet. “Christ knows _I_  don’t. Wylla sure doesn’t either,” he says, scrubbing his face with his hands as he stretches.

“Are you  _mad_ at me right now or something?” she asks.

Shireen gets to her feet beside him, her face tipped up and her arms folded across her chest like armor.  _Why is this so weird right now?_ He thinks of their talk in the truck and the hot way she looked at him in her dad’s office. He  _knows_  that look, he’s been on the giving and receiving end of it, but everything else has him as confused as all this sleep he just got. Rickon looks back at her, and his head and his eyes feel heavy, as if his very cells have glutted themselves on this precious boon of restorative sleep.  _Don’t be a dick, don’t be a dick, don’t be a dick._ He sighs and shakes his head.

“This is going to sound weird, but I don’t think I’m used to as much sleep as I just got, and I think it’s fucking with me, that’s all.  I’ve never slept so good. It’s just- it’s weird,” he says.  _Bran says I should thank you,_  he thinks, but he doesn’t do it.

Shireen stares at him a long moment, head tipping to the side as she frowns like she’s working hard to believe a bunch of bullshit. She bites her lip the way she does, tries to figure him out with that somber-eyed look of hers, but at last she laughs. It’s a head shaking thing, and she looks down a moment, stares at her own bare feet as she rubs one on top of the other.

“You’d think you would have tried sleeping on the couch after all this time,” she says when she finally looks up at him, and he laughs outright because  _She has no fucking idea, does she,_ and now he feels stupid, and he basically understands himself to be an idiot.

“I guess I’ll give it another shot tonight,” he says, earning himself a wider smile out of her.

“You guys want any breakfast?” Jojen calls out, and when Rickon turns around he can finally smell that low drift of bacon when the fat starts to render.

“Oh, hey, thanks so much but I really should be going,” Shireen says, leaning to the side to look past Rickon into the kitchen. “Honestly, I’d love to, but today’s moving day, and I’d like to get an early start.”

“Wait, you’re moving back? Even after, uh,” he says, glancing over his shoulder, stepping closer to her as she slides her feet into her shoes. “Even after last night with Mel’s text and everything?” and now Rickon knows what it’s like, to grasp at straws.

“It’ll be all right. New locks and an alarm system will keep her goons out. And honestly, I need to get back to my routine. Work life, home life, everyday life. Except- well,” she says, sliding between him and the coffee table, her body a soft brush against his arm as he turns with her movement to watch as she grabs her purse and keys from the old end table by the door.

“What? What’s up?” he asks, walking to the front door where she’s a pause and linger, folding his arms across his chest as he gazes down at her with a frown.

“Well, everyday life except with new friends, I hope,” she says as she smiles, reaches out to rest her hand on his crossed forearm.

 _Ah_ , he thinks.  _Friends._

“Absolutely,” he says with a nod. “Though if you ever need me to check on you or whatever, just let me know,” he says, holding the door after she unlocks and opens it.

Shireen swears under her breath, opening her purse for a pair of sunglasses that she slides on her nose, steps through and turns to look at him, standing on the concrete slab of front stoop.

“As a PSD or a friend?” she asks with a teasing smile, and she is backlit with morning sunshine, a halo of early day sizzle that is already hot.

“As a hooligan,” he says, grinning when she laughs.

She tells him that’s even better, tells him to get back to that couch and sleep, says she’ll text him later to know she’s all right and to tell Bran and Jojen thanks again for the breakfast offer, and he watches her drive away before closing the door and locking it. Rickon sighs.  _Eight fucking hours,_  he thinks, shaking his head in disbelief as he heads into the kitchen.

“So,” Bran says, using a piece of bacon to push scrambled egg on his fork. “You two seemed cozy, all curled up like kitties together.”

“Cozier than you’ve been with Wylla in weeks,” Jojen adds, smearing Cat’s homemade jelly on his toast.

“More like months,” Bran says offhandedly, reaching for the salt shaker, smiling when Jojen passes it without looking up from his plate.

“That’s right,  _weeks_  is how long he’s known Shireen,” Jojen says.

“Shireen seems nice, doesn’t she? Hey, you don’t have enough Tapatio on there,” and Bran unscrews the lid and slogs another shake or two of hot sauce on his boyfriend’s eggs.

“Thanks, B. You know, she’s  _cute,_  too.”

“So cute.”

“I’d let her beard for me if we needed that. I mean, only if you’d be comfortable with that.”

“Jo, please. I would be honored. Imagine her bopping around here in those uh, what are they called, you know,” he says, sitting back in his chair as he snaps his fingers to find the word.

“Booty shorts?” Jojen guesses, expression serious. “Boyfriend thingies, you know, underpants _._ No, boy short panties,  _that’s_ it.”

Rickon stares at them with the back and forth attention saved for tennis matches, his fork a hover halfway between his plate and mouth. He is used to this from them, the banter and tease, the volley and quips, but it is never aimed at him. Sansa when she started mooning over big scary Sandor, Robb when suddenly every other word out of his mouth was  _Dacey_ , but by virtue of his trauma or the fact that he’s been with the same woman more or less for years, Rickon is always left alone. And then it dawns on him.

“You know what, fuck you guys. I’d break your legs if I knew you could feel it,” he snaps, shoveling his eggs in his mouth. “Same goes to you, stoner,” and he scowls as they both burst into laughter. 

 

Shireen makes her way down Congress Street, having parked in a lot behind a row of restaurants and bars a few blocks away from her destination. It’s hot and humid despite being nearly eight o’clock, but she’s in a short black romper with spaghetti straps and has her hair piled up on her head, can feel licks of idle breeze here and there when they gust through the flares of her shorts and on the damp nape of her neck. She resists the urge to check her reflection in the store front windows as she passes by. _I checked and double checked this outfit in the mirror. I look hot. I look sexy. I_ am _sexy,_ she thinks, lifting her chin at the affirmation.

“Check out lizard face,” some gutter punk says to his friend as she waits for the light to change on the corner of Congress and 6th. He’s in ripped up black jeans and a t-shirt that is so filthy she cannot tell if it’s olive green or just stained that way. “You got a tongue to match that scaly face, lizard girl?”

 Appalled, she stares at him in mute shock, looking him over the way she stared at the hunk of crud she once pulled out of the garbage disposal. His nerve and unapologetic grin instantly rob her of the praise she just heaped upon herself and she stands there feeling utterly stripped down. Gone are the artsy statement jewelry and silver-strapped wedge sandals, leaving behind nothing but ugliness and scars, damaged goods that can’t even stand up for itself. For a moment she thinks she might cry, can imagine the streaks of ruined eyeliner and mascara further muddying her face. But then out of nowhere, despite trying to forget about him ever since they parted earlier this morning, she hears Rickon’s _Honestly, they’re nothing,_ and _They don’t mean shit, Shir,_ and she thinks _Goddamn right they don’t mean shit._

The light changes and she cinches her shoulder blades together, thrusts her chest forward and sways her hips when the light changes and she can cross the street.

“You know what, you can go fuck yourself,” she says, turning to face him with a sweet smile as she walks backwards across the street. “Unless you have an issue with sticking your dick in a festering pile of horseshit.”

The gutter punk’s friend shouts a laugh, covers his mouth with a hand as he hoots and hollers _._ Before Shireen turns around again she sees the look on the first guy’s face, so stunned and taken aback it makes her laugh, a head tossing thing that makes her feel suddenly weightless, even in this thick air with the hot asphalt sending the heat right back up to the sky.

She feels all lit up when she finally makes it to 47 Scott, a wildly popular little speakeasy-style bar where she’s going to meet Sansa and Sandor. She feels fizzy and bright like a sparkler from the adrenaline of a well-timed comeback and the fact that a recent reflection check proved she is, indeed, rocking the hell out of this outfit. The door is an easy pull and she steps from a world of sun-soaked saturated color and warmth into one of cool dusky shadow and tea light candles, and the low swank croon of old school jazz.

The postage-stamp sized room is a bar on the left and four tables against the wall on the right with a couple of loveseats in the far corner, with a long dark hallway connecting the back of the room to the bathrooms and its parent restaurant next door, and that’s it. It doesn’t take much to fill it to capacity but right now it’s barely occupied thanks to the early evening hour, and she smiles when she sees that aside from a guy and girl at the bar that only her friends occupy it.

Sansa and Sandor are sitting at a small round table in wingback armchairs near the far corner where Jojen sits next to Bran’s wheelchair, and they’re all waves and beaming easy smiles save for Sandor, who merely nods in her direction. There’s a fleeting moment where she feels the odd woman out, especially because Sansa invited her to hang out with friends, said nothing of it being two couples out on a date. There’s a part of her that wants to turn away and walk back to her car and drive back home but when she imagines walking by that loser again, when she imagines the kind of insult he’d throw if he knew she was turning tail, Shireen laces on a smile and waves back.

“Shireen, you made it,” Sansa calls out with a vivid smile as she sips her cocktail, her body a close snug fit against Sandor’s. “Get a drink and come sit.”

“Shireen?”

The man at the bar stands up from his lean against the countertop, and she knows who is it before he even turns around to face her, and despite her better judgment she smiles when Rickon sets his eyes on her. _I fell asleep on him and he wrenched away from me,_ but still, it’s all smiles from her when he lets his gaze drop to her shoes, does that slow lift back up to her eyes. _Friends, friends, friends,_ she reminds herself, wondering if even that is an overreach, considering how he snapped at her when she tried apologizing earlier that morning.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he says with a grin that makes her eager smiles feel less out of place at the same time it makes her second guess everything. Easy and smooth one minute, a snap and draw back the next, the strangest dance she’s ever done.

“Here comes Trouble,” she grins, unable to help herself, and she feels flushed when he closes his eyes and chuckles.

“Come on, let me get you a drink,” Rickon says, lifting his arm from his body and halfway towards her as if to corral her towards the bar. He’s dressed in a button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wears it with dark denim and black shoes, the fancier version of last night’s outfit. _The smudge of his thumb on my face, the flick of his tongue, oh God, I had to have imagined it,_ she thinks, because he’s all easy gesture and elbows resting on the bar top, all tip of his face towards her when he asks how it went, moving back in to her old place.

“It’s fine,” she says with a downturned smile. “Your sisters were amazing with the help, and Gendry even pitched in when he swung by to get Arya,” and she tells him how the two of them are camping up at Jackson’s Cabin in the Galiuros Mountains a few hours out of town.

He’s drinking an old fashioned, orders her a concoction of gin and ginger and lemon when she says she wants something crisp.

“Good choice, if I do say so myself,” says the only other person at the bar, a dark haired woman with the type of pixie cut Shireen has always wished she could pull off, especially during the summer. She is all smirk and clever eyes, a tube top under a loose, color-spattered pair of painter’s overalls with a cigarette tucked behind her ear like a pencil.

“Thanks, Mya,” Rickon says. “She and Lothor own the joint,” he says as an aside, tipping his head towards the bartender, a man better suited for a life in the ring than behind a bar, judging by his build and the rugged cut of his features. “Come on, let’s go sit with those idiots before they give me any more grief,” he says, picking up both of their drinks as he gestures with one that she lead the way.

“Those idiots are your family, buster,” she reminds him with a smile tossed over her shoulder, and it does not escape her, that Rickon his to lift his eyes to hers when she catches the southward drift of his gaze.

“Yeah, but Bran’s on fire tonight. He’s been making obscene gestures the entire time,” he says, nodding towards his brother, and when she turns back it’s just in time to see Bran doing something _very_ suggestive with his tongue between his fingers.

They sit and they talk, the six of them, and her laughter and anecdotes taste like gin and citrus, her tongue is cold from hand-and-chisel-chipped ice, her skin has finally rid itself of the summertime flush here in this cool, dark little nook they’re in. The place fills up quickly, and the thicket of standing people in the center of the room lends a cozy feel of privacy to the circle of chairs and loveseats they sit in. It’s easy here with the lilt and twist and turn of conversation to forget how she was brought into their fold; that it started with tears when it’s ended up so soaked in smiles.

Rickon is relaxed, butt scooted to the edge of his chair as he leans back in it like he owns it, his old fashioned a loose grip between thumb and forefinger on one knee. Bran is good humor, a steady source of wry observation while his boyfriend doles out enigmatic smiles and amused looks. Sansa is a chessboard’s white queen in a pale sundress with her hair in a fishtail braid, Sandor her black king with his dark shirt and those looks he gives Sansa that make Shireen think of words like smoke and smolder. He is not devoid of playfulness, however; Shireen watches him casually set his drink on table, his fingers a chilly glisten from the glass’s condensation when he lifts them and drags them down the back of Sansa’s neck. She is a gasp and a shiver, and Shireen smiles at the affection, the tease, the lingering hot look Sandor pins on the red haired woman at his side. Sansa grins, leans in to kiss him, his scars a stretch when he kisses her back. It makes her want to touch her cheek, but then that reminds her.

“I think I owe you a thank you, by the way,” Shireen murmurs when Rickon comes back with Jojen and a fresh round of drinks, when he takes the empty spot next to her on the loveseat she’s commandeered. He tips his head towards her to listen, eyelids a drop, and he looks relaxed and sleepy and like a lazy rainy morning, and all of a sudden it’s hard to focus. She clears her throat, tells him about the gutter punk creep from the corner, how she remembered what Rickon told her, how she gave the guy a sharp-edged piece of her mind to choke on, and he laughs when she tells him what she said.

“Oh yeah? Well I’ll gladly take a thank you over another one of your apologies,” says Rickon with a sidelong glance over the rim of his glass when he takes a drink. “Christ knows there were plenty of those this morning.”

“This morning?” Sansa says, her bright eyes an immediate snap to Shireen, because it was a topic of high interest when she returned to their house in last night’s clothes, when she was stutter and stop and evasive answers, when she had to parry and sidestep Arya’s onslaught of questions.

“Here we go,” Shireen says, hiding her face with the shield of her hand as she takes a long steady swallow of gin.

“What?” Sandor asks Sansa, giving her braid a tug when she simply laughs and shakes her head.

“Rickon and Shireen slept together last night,” Bran says with a grin, and he slaps the brakes on his chair when Rickon lifts his foot and gives one of his wheels a sharp kick.

“Who gives a shit?” Sandor says with a shrug. “Oh, right, the girlfriend,” he says when Sansa rests her hand on his shoulder, her mouth a conspiratorial kiss as she murmurs in his ear.

“Okay, but did _not_ sleep together,” Shireen says as she nudges Rickon with an elbow to his ribs, because the last thing she wants to be is the thing she’d _never_ be: the other woman. “Ric, would you _please_ tell them about Wylla?” she hisses, giving him a pointed look when he gazes at her with an amused expression. He studies her a moment, eyes a flicker across her face, before finally he nods and comes to her rescue.

“Wylla and I broke up,” he shrugs, watching her for another moment before glancing around to the others. “And it’s no big deal, either, Sansa, so save the puppy dog eyes for someone else,” he says, some of that old familiar rankle seeping into his tone when his sister leans forward and says _Honey, I’m so sorry._ “Seriously, it’s nothing,” he says. “And we didn’t sleep together last night.”

“Well, _technically,_ you did,” Jojen says, but there is a laugh from behind them, curled in like the bitter rind of an orange and loud enough to interrupt them. It’s the laugh of a woman, and when Shireen looks up she recognizes it as the laugh of a woman scorned.

“No big deal, huh, _Ric_?” Wylla says when she turns around, her green hair brown in the low lighting, her expression twisted with anger and hurt. She’s wearing a vintage slip for a dress and heavy black eyeshadow, stands there with such a wounded, haunted look in her eyes that Shireen’s heart goes out to her. At least, it does for a minute. “And I _knew_ it, I _knew_ you were fucking _her_ ,” she says, a little overloud, a little overblown, and when she points at Shireen the cocktail in her hand tips and a slop of alcohol abandons her glass to die on the floor below.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Rickon sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose.

“Did you wait ‘til he dumped me, sweetheart, or did you fuck him the minute he gave you a second look?” she says, her voice a seethe and spit, the look she gives a throwback to the gutter punk from earlier, and Shireen feels the loathing in her words as sure as if they were a solid slap across the face.

“Hey, calm the fuck down, Wylls, would you? Leave her alone, she didn’t do shit. Nobody’s fucking me, _believe_ me,” he says.

“Don’t use your little pet names for me, Rickon. You threw away that privilege when you threw _me_ away so you could screw your little charity case over here,” she says, and if she wasn’t so clearly intoxicated Shireen would take offense to these digs; if she hadn’t had her heart broken in the past she’d think it all an overdramatic hissy fit. But it’s _sad,_ is what it is, how determined Wylla is to misunderstand and to accuse, to hate and rage instead of accept and walk away. _And a part of you likes that she’s jealous,_ a voice tells her, one she firmly ignores.

“Sleeping isn’t the same thing as fucking, Wylla,” Bran says, craning his neck to look back at where she stands behind Jojen’s chair.

“ _Fuck_ you, Bran,” she snaps, staggering slightly as she steps back to glare at him before walking down the hallway towards the bathroom.

“No thanks, honey,” he mutters, making Jojen snort a laugh into his cocktail though no one else finds it all that funny, not after the ex-girlfriend thunderstorm.

“You better go talk to her, Ric,” Shireen murmurs. It stings to say, because she’s just gotten comfortable with the way his weight pulls her closer to him, with the way he was _just_ about to stretch his arm out along the back of the loveseat they share.  

“After all that shit she said about you,” he says, so incredulous it sends a tingle arcing through her. “You want me to go _over_ there right now?”

“I agree with her, honey,” Sansa says with a nod when her little brother shifts his gaze from Shireen to her. “There’s an awful lot you could clear up. That’s a pretty bad picture she’s drawn of you, Shireen as well.”

He rests his hand on the cap of Shireen’s knee, his body a twist into hers here on the little loveseat. _The friendseat,_ she thinks, watching his mouth when he speaks.

“You’re okay, right? She’s just hammered, she didn’t mean any of that stuff, but I know that- well, I just uh, I know how you feel about the, you know,” he says.

“Go talk to her,” she says, and he nods with a labored sigh, pushing off of her knee as he gets to his feet.

Rickon drains his drink and sets the empty glass on Sandor and Sansa’s table, and Shireen watches him walk away, the way his shoulders move as he disappears down the corridor, and she wonders how tired they are, from all the things they seem to carry. It’s quiet between the five of them now that he’s gone, the easy conversation drowned in the choppy wake of Wylla’s departure.

“It’s no wonder he broke up with her,” Sandor says after a long moment of uncomfortable silence, and Bran and Jojen laugh even though Sansa says _Sandor, quit it,_ and the dark, lonely parts of Shireen, the thorny brittle _mean_ parts of her make her feel a little less guilty when she laughs too.

 

It’s a long rambling slur of accusation and tears, standing in the bend of the hallway between the bar and the restaurant. It’s smeared makeup and the angry declaration that he’s the biggest asshole she’s ever known, over and over again for every goddamn stranger’s benefit as they pass them by on the way to the bathroom. He suddenly feels exhausted, standing with his arms across his chest and his head bowed as he listens to her. She gesticulates with her hands and her glass before finally he plucks it from her liquor-loose fingers, scared she’ll drop it or worse, hurl it at his face.

“Would you please just listen to me for a second?” he says during a hiccupping break between insults, and he closes his hand around one of her wrists when she lifts her hands to argue with him. He draws her arm down, wills her to chill the fuck out and hear him. “I’m not having sex with anyone, and I haven’t slept with anyone but you except when you basically demanded it of me,” he says, referencing when he was stationed out of state before being shipped overseas. “Why are you so determined to invent some sort of cheap dirty affair, Wylla? Huh? Tell me,” he says.

“Because,” she says, her voice hitching and breaking, cracking like the shell of an egg. She gives a shuddering sigh, looking up to the ceiling as she wipes under her eyes with her fingertips, trying to clean up the mess she’s made of her makeup. “Because,” she says, pinning him with a watery look of misery, “if it’s not that then it’s just because of me, and that idea has been killing me, baby,” she drawls, and now he’s mad.

“You don’t get to _pull_ this shit, Wylla. You weren’t in a relationship with _me_ the past few months; you were in a relationship with a version of me that isn’t around anymore, okay? Or did you fucking _forget_ telling me how much you _missed_ him?” The tightness of the hallway and the back and forth drift of people make him feel claustrophobic, or maybe it’s the nonstop of this shit between them, a song on repeat he’s been sick of for far longer than he can even remember.

“You miss him, too, you said so,” she retorts a little too fast, too swept up in the thrill of a good old fashioned argument to remember her sorrow.

“Yeah, well, maybe I’m more interested in taking care of the guy I am right now instead of jacking off to the memory of the guy I used to be,” he says, ignoring the offended look of a middle aged woman who drifts by on her way to the bar.  With his mind’s eye, Rickon sees the silhouette of a black haired woman, and he remembers the low hum of his truck’s A/C as she spoke kind words to him, light things, true things.

 “I’m fine the way I am, Wylla,” he says. “I’m not some broken down piece of shit you need to mourn. No,” he says, holding up a hand and backing away from her when she tries another hot-mess plea. “You gave up _that_ privilege when you realized you can’t love me anymore,” and he turns on the heel of his dress shoes, the ones he hasn’t worn since Wex and Osha’s memorial, and leaves her behind, leaves her in the past, leaves.

“You okay, buddy?” Lothor asks when Rickon slaps a twenty dollar bill on the bar, recalling from memory what he ordered even though there’s easily twenty people here now.

“I’m fine,” he says, watching him pour. “Do me a favor though and cut off the girl with green hair. She’s had her fucking limit,” he says, and he thinks _So have I_ as he turns back to his family and friends.

“I’m sure that wasn’t easy,” Sansa says when he cuts through the small crowd, and all these people are already a touch too close for him now after his nerves and dander are up from the fight with Wylla. “But I bet you’re glad for it, setting her straight.”

“That remains to be seen,” he mutters, sipping his drink as his eyes fall on the empty loveseat. Rickon frowns, glances back to the bar. “Where’s Shireen?”

“Outside talking to some woman,” Sandor says with a jerk of his head towards the front door, his arm stretched out across the back of Sansa’s chair like the drape of a dragon’s wing over its treasure.

“’Some woman’?” he says, setting his drink on the table. He turns around to stare at the door as if he could see through it, hands in his pockets, smartphone in his hand as he considers texting her like an idiot. He feels bad about Wylla’s histrionics, wants to make sure Shireen’s okay despite her cool reaction to the outburst. His left hand closes into a fist as he remembers the curve of her knee, how it fit in his palm like a ripe apple.

“Yeah, some middle aged lady,” Bran says with a shrug. “She wanted to talk to Shireen so they went outside.”

“A middle aged lady? You mean like the age of her fucking stepmother?”

“Ric, come on, if it was Mel then Shireen would’ve said something,” Sansa starts, but he’s shaking his head, already pushing through animated conversations the color of whiskey and the warmth of rum, the tang of bitters and lime on the air.

She’s got her back to him when he steps out on the hot sidewalk, and the woman talking to her is the same one who sneered at him in the hallway, pretty and expensive and _angry,_ judging by her expression. He remembers the coldness of Shireen’s father’s house and how hard it was to imagine her coming from such a place, and his steps quicken as he strides over to them.

“You’re clearly trying to get your hands on money that doesn’t belong to you. She was his _wife,_ all right? I know it’s hard for spoiled little brats to understand that, but she devoted her life to him, and now you’re shoving her over the edge at the same you try to take away her safety net,” the woman says, leaning in close to Shireen.

“I’m not _taking_ anything that isn’t mind to have. My father changed that will and left it all to _me,_ and—” she starts, is cut off cleanly when the other woman sucks in a gasp.

“You’re a liar,” she says. “I was there and I recall _no_ such thing. He cut out his _brother,_ my _husband_ , yes, leaving us high and dry with Robert’s gambling problems and no help, not that he ever helped us before,” she says, trailing off on her bitter tangent.

“ _You’re_ the liar,” Shireen shouts, drawing attention from a small group of people at the end of the block. “Mel was fucking some guy behind my father’s back and he _knew_ it,” Shireen snaps, and Rickon cannot help but grin to hear the fire in her tone. _That’s my girl,_ he thinks before he reminds himself she’s not his at all.

The other woman steps back like she’s just been stung, but then she lunges forward and snares Shireen by the upper arm. Rickon narrows his eyes.

“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” she starts, but Rickon has had enough.

“There a problem out here?” he says, thinking of Sandor as he slings his arm across Shireen’s shoulders, drawing her protectively against his chest. He can feel her slump against him, the shake in her hand when she rests it lightly on his chest, and it’s an echo of waking up with her that morning.

The woman sizes him up, the faintest flicker of recognition sweeping across her face. He’s heard the expression “pretty is as pretty does”a thousand times in his life, but never before has he seen such a compelling case for how true it can be. Because this woman is beautiful, the sum of her features declaring it with ease, but the hate in her eyes and the mean twist of her mouth are _ugly,_ and he finds himself repulsed by them and by her.

“No, Romeo, there’s no fucking problem,” she says finally, lifting her chin. “I was just wishing my niece a nice night.” She smoothes her red skirt down her hips and thighs to rid herself of nonexistent wrinkles, and he imagines her doing the same with people who stand in her way. A sweep of the hand, a brush of the fingers, and then poof, gone. He flexes his bicep, pulling Shireen closer.

They turn as one to watch the woman walk away, Shireen a reflexive flinch when pretty-is-as-pretty-does yanks on the door to the bar and throws a scathing look at them before heading back inside. Rickon lets loose a sigh.

“You sure got a lot of Mother Theresas in your life, don’t you,” he says, inclining his head to look at her under the weight of his arm. “You okay?” and he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised when she shakes her head and bursts into tears.

“I want to get the hell out of here and just go home,” she says, turning her face into his chest to hide her tears when passersby give her a curious look. He’s got his forearm draped over her shoulder in the casual aloofness of a hug between friends, but at the feel of her distress he moves, cups her upper arm with his hand to hold her against him.

“Of course,” he says with a nod, all inner confliction now because while he’s sorry to hear the evening is cut short he also finds he doesn’t much like seeing her cry. _No, women. I don’t like seeing_ women _cry._ “Want me to drive you home?”

She shakes her head. “I’m parked downtown,” she says, and when she tells him where her car is he insists she let him drive her to it.

“You got a uh, a purse or anything in there?” he says, trying and failing to remember if she had one when she walked in, but all he can think of is short shorts and legs made longer in a pair of high heels, and then all he can think is Jojen talking about panties.

“No, I have pockets,” she says, and he looks down in time to see her pluck the cuff of her pocket with her thumb and hold it out. He chuckles and shakes his head.

“ _That_ little thing has pockets? Wonders never cease,” he says, and she laughs between sniffles.

He’s comforted Arya and Sansa, Wylla a million times in his life, and his experience with women tells him not to pull away from her while she’s so upset, and as they walk to his truck a block away he keeps his arm around her, keeps her tucked in close despite the heat. While he tells himself she’s only keeping her hand on his chest because she’s upset, she tells him about that woman, her aunt Cersei who’s always been a cold bitch but suddenly turned vicious as she laid into Shireen over the whole Mel thing. By the time he’s got the passenger side door open he knows all about it, how despite Cersei and Robert being present for the reading of the new will, she is clearly lying on Mel’s behalf.

“What about your uncle?” he says, sorry to feel the absence of her when she draws herself out from under his arm to get in the truck, though his entire left side is sweating from the closeness, from the heat of summer and the heat of her body. _Wonders never cease, huh,_ he thinks _. Tell me about it._

“He was probably so drunk he won’t even remember,” she sighs, and he says _Ah,_ shuts the door before walking around the truck to the driver’s side.

It’s a short distance but he catches two red lights on the way, and they’re idling at the second one when she asks for gum. He nods, watches with a strange sort of amusement as she familiarly opens the glove box to dig through the contents to find his pack of Trident.

“Hey, what’re these?” she asks, and he doesn’t need to turn his head from the road to see what she means, because he hears the jingle and rattle, knows what’s in her hands when she straightens and pulls them out of the compartment.

“My dog tags,” he says, and she says Ah, and they gaze at the red light, waiting for it to change.

He drives through the intersection and turns into the parking lot, and because he’s spent so much time with her he knows her car, pulls up in the empty spot by her little Saab before putting the truck in neutral and taking his foot off the clutch. They seem to have the heavy conversations in cars, maybe because of forced proximity or the safety such close confines seem to inspire. Either way, he’s not surprised when she looks up at him, the tags nested in her palm with the chain dangling between her fingers, serious questions in the lift of her eyes that he looks away from.

“I threw them in there when I first got back and I haven’t really given them a lot of thought,” he says. But it’s a lie and he backtracks to erase it and use the truth to write over it. Rickon sighs. “I wanted to throw them off a bridge or in the trash but at the end of the day, I couldn’t. I worked my fucking ass off, man, and at the end of the day I can’t help but feel some pride about that, so I can’t get rid of them. I did a lot of- I mean, there’s some shit I did, some stuff I saw that—”

“You don’t have to tell me,” she says, quickly and quietly to silence him, her voice a rolled up softness like that cashmere sweater Sansa’s so proud of. Shireen shakes her head when he slides his gaze back to her. “I’m not interested in taking anything you don’t really want to give.”

He smiles as they regard each other, and he wonders how it’s so easy for her to _get it_ when it’s so goddamned hard for everyone else. She thinks he’s fine the way he is, but he wonders if she’d still think that way if he just went ahead and told her everything about Iraq. Rickon drops his gaze to the tags in her hand.

“You know what, you go ahead and you keep those,” he says, nodding towards them, and he rolls his eyes at her shocked gasp.

“No way, Ric, I couldn’t,” she breathes, though the offer has her looking down at the tags, her finger a trace over STARK, RICKON, and oh, it makes him wonder.

He reaches over, uses his hand to fold her fingers over the tags, squeezing her fist lightly before pulling away.

“Yeah you could. You just said it yourself, you won’t take what I don’t wanna give. Well, I wanna give those to you, okay? I have a feeling you’ll take better care of them than I ever did,” he says.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/125223415168/a-world-alone-chapter-10) 
> 
>  
> 
> Warning for some intense stuff about half way through

She’s been stuffing welcome packets for two hours now, her fingers an automatic pluck and shuffle through brightly colored papers advertising the new gym and restaurants in the student union, glossy brochures boasting the university’s gorgeous campus and Tucson’s sunny weather. It’s boring, monotonous work, better suited for an entry level intern instead of someone who’s worked here for years like she has, but the office is a bare bones operation with everyone taking vacations before the school year starts up. She is mentally checked out, has unleashed her mind to let it graze and roam, and despite everything that is in upheaval in her life, despite her father’s death and the conflicts with Mel, despite the break in and moving from place to place, her thoughts are a dogged, loyal return to Rickon.

It’s been over a week since Shireen last hung out with him at 47 Scott, having run out of excuses to need him aside from the honest truth of simply wanting to  _see_ him, having yet to acquire the courage to just come out and admit it. It is impossible to deny now, that she’s crushing on him and crushing hard; when she answers the office phone she doodles dog tags and pickup trucks in the margins of the message slips, a half smile playing around on her mouth until she realizes what she’s doing. She tells herself it’s all for the sake of distraction here in the mess her life has become these days, tells herself it’s because he’s the calm in a storm, ignores the very real fact that finding comfort in someone  _says_  something.

She finishes stuffing one manila envelope, is sliding a glue stick across the flap before pressing it down and sealing the thing when her phone rings, making her jump. The wander of her thoughts is snagged back in place as she picks up her phone from the desk, and her heart sinks when she sees it isn’t  _him_.

“Hey, Davos,” she says, sitting back in her chair, gazing out the tinted office window at the campus mall, a long swath of green grass that stretches from the Old Main building all the way up to Campbell Road.

“I hear  _you’ve_ been busy,” he says, the timbre of his voice a low roll of dry humor. She can practically see him glancing over the rims of his glasses.

“If you’re talking about Cersei,  _she_ is the one who came up to  _me,_ ” she says with a little flare of righteous indignation.

“I see we’ve already forgotten about sneaking into Mel’s house, though for the life of me I can’t see how. You’re by no means boring, Shir, but I think breaking and entering is rather more exciting than your typical weekend recreation,” he says, and just like that her thoughts trot back over to Rickon.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she says loftily, trying hard at nonchalance and failing miserably.

“Mel told me she saw two people standing in Stannis’s office and thought it was you and Gendry. She said she texted you about it and you didn’t even deny it.”

“Okay, first off, I didn’t  _debase_  myself by bothering to reply to her, and secondly, you believe her over me?” she says hotly, sitting up in her chair.

“Honey, come on. I’m not siding with her or anything; I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on. I’m worried about you,” he says, and the grandfatherly quality of his voice and his words makes her shoulders slump.

“Okay, fine. Yes, I went in there to try and find the new will,” she says, and she tells him everything, how Rickon –  _RickonRickonRickon –_ helped her, how ominous Mel’s text was later that evening, and how they didn’t really find anything, but that reminds her. “Hey, do you know what um,” she says, pawing through the contents of her purse before she finds her father’s keys. “Have you ever heard of Storm’s End? Did my dad ever mention that?”

“Storm’s End? No, not off the top of my head,” he says. “Why?”

She describes the keys to him as she turns them over in her hand, tells him where she found them and how they were clearly not meant to be discovered. She muses out loud about safes, bank deposit boxes or maybe some hidden filing cabinet somewhere.

“Stannis never mentioned anything like a secret lock box, and he wasn’t exactly the kind of man to give whimsical names to filing cabinets or safes,” he says, some of that humor coming back. “But I’ll look into it and see what I can dig up, so long as you promise me to stay away from that woman.”

“Fine, I promise,” she says. “How is everything going with you?”

“Oh, it’s going,” he says with a sigh. “Her lawyer filed the old will down at the probate court earlier this week and I submitted paperwork to contest it,” he says, and the rest of the conversation is depressing and dull, full of litigious detail that numbs up her brain as much as it darkens her heart.

Shireen finishes her summer-shortened work day in glum silence, stuffing envelopes with force now, and she feels stymied and abused, underestimated and small. The world seems a little harsher for it, a little more hell bent on making her miserable. She hits every red light on the way to the grocery store, drops a carton of eggs in the checkout lane, and when she comes home she remembers she has to lug her dirty clothes down to the laundromat if she wants anything clean to wear tomorrow.

Sweat is an irritating slide down her back as she drags her hamper down the driveway, the waistband of her cutoff shorts already sticking to her skin, and even with the couple of kids biking down the sidewalk she still says  _Fucking goddammit_  when she remembers the IKEA coffee table still in its box sitting in her backseat taking up valuable hamper space.

“Someone needs a bar soap lollipop with a mouth like that,” Mrs. Celtigar says, and Shireen spins around to see her landlady standing in her front yard, watering the plants with a garden hose and a Bloody Mary in her hand.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you there,” Shireen says, leaning against the trunk of her car only to yelp and stand straight because the metal is so scalding hot.

“I bet you saw _them_ ,” Mrs. C says, gesturing with a wave of her hose towards the boys on their Huffy bikes, staring over their shoulders at her as they pedal away.

“Well, I- yeah. Yeah, I did,” she says, grinning when the admission makes Mrs. Celtigar laugh.

She explains the situation about her laundry, how it’s the cherry on top of a crap sundae, and before she knows it she’s being escorted into her landlady’s house for the first time in her life. Her hamper is a wicker scrape against the Saltillo tile, and her sweat cools and dries in the air conditioned foyer.

“Come on now, let me show you the laundry room,” Mrs. Celtigar says, the slap of her flip flops and the tinkling of ice cubes and vodka leading the way as Shireen follows her.

The place is decorated in British Colonial style, palm fronds bobbing under the laze of basket-weave ceiling fan blades, dark wood furniture popping against the whitewashed walls, what looks like an old hunting rifle hanging over the fireplace. It is large and airy with strains of Mel Torme wafting in from some other room. She is led through a large sitting room with a wall of windows and French doors through which she can just make out her guest house on the edge of the backyard, and through a spotless kitchen, its butcher block island scattered with the chopped ends of celery, a squeezed lime and an opened jar of olives. The laundry room holds its own against the other grandiose parts of the house Shireen has seen, state of the art appliances on one wall with an ironing board and deep sink on the other. It looks like it’s never been used.

“Thank you  _so_  much, seriously,” Shireen says after she starts up a load, watching Mrs. Celtigar make a frensh round Bloody Marys. “For the laundry  _and_ the drink,” she grins, taking a sip as her landlady leads her back to the sitting room.

“So, where is your shadow these days? You know, that tall, rude young man of yours. I was surprised to see you today without him following you around glowering at everybody,” she says when they sit across from each other in overstuffed white armchairs that make Shireen nervous with the red of her drink.

“Oh, well,” she says with a beat of hesitation, unsure how much to tell her landlady about her stepmother. “He was, um, well, he was sort of helping me out with something, but I don’t really need the help anymore.”

It sucks because it’s the truth, because he’s basically dropped off the radar, because now that the checks have stopped so has their time together. It stings like slapping a sunburn, to think back on the mounting sense of familiarity and the grins that seemed to come easier and easier to the both of them, to think of his comfort and closeness and realize that maybe they were just job duties. Shireen stirs her drink with her stalk of celery before carefully lifting it to take a bite, and her mouth is a flood of crisp and cold, of spice and pepper, and she sighs after she swallows the bite.

“I always used to tell my husband, that’s the late Mr. Celtigar to you, that a sigh was the sound of young love,” Mrs. Celtigar muses, sitting back in her chair, her wrist a bend as she holds her glass on the armrest.

Shireen’s gaze flicks up from her drink to her landlady, and the woman’s wrinkles deepen around her mouth as she grins.

“Oh, yes, young lady, it’s written all over your face. You’re mooning over this boy, aren’t you,” she says, and she throws her head back and laughs when Shireen vigorously shakes her head no.

“I wasn’t sighing,” she starts, and she rolls her eyes when the old woman’s cackle intensifies. “Okay _,_  I _was_ sighing, but only because I had a really crummy day.”

“Because your young man isn’t around, most likely. Oh please,” she says with a careless wave of her free hand when Shireen tries to protest. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you,” she says, and either she slipped up by admitting she’s a snooping neighbor or she just doesn’t care. If Shireen knows her at all it’s the latter.

“He- I mean, it’s a nice thought,” she says, because apparently it’s an afternoon for honesty. “But I’ve seen the type of woman he dates, and I am nowhere near his type. Plus,” she says after a bitten-lip moment of hesitation, and she points to her left cheek with another sigh. “There’s this,” she says, because it’s one thing to say they’re of no consequence and it’s another thing entirely to kiss them, to caress them, to  _love_ them.  _He’s touched them twice,_  she reminds herself.  _Rickon likes women like Wylla, wild and sexy and nothing at all like you,_ she volleys.  _Rickon gave_ you _his dog tags, not Wylla, you idiot,_  she retorts.  _Yeah, but he hasn’t even texted you in a week,_  she admonishes, and there is no argument for that one.

“Now you’re just being foolish,” Mrs. Celtigar says, as if she can hear the back and forth going on inside Shireen’s head. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and if there’s anyone who’s busy beholding you it’s that man. You say he was helping you out? Well, I have a feeling it was more than just a sense of duty egging him on.”

“He’s ex-military though, duty is his sort of thing.”

“Frivolous details,” Mrs. Celtigar says with another wave of her hand. “Mark my words, dear, you ring him up and ask him for more help and I’m sure he’ll come running, and it will be the  _man_  in him trotting on over, not the military.”

“You really think so?” she says, half annoyed and half amused at how  _shy_  she sounds all of a sudden. But with everything else in her world so torn to shreds it’s hard to imagine adding another catastrophe on top of the others.

“Please. You don’t get to be my age without learning a thing or two. Trust me,” she says as she takes another long swallow of her drink.

Shireen turns to gaze out into the backyard, a sprawl of manicured grass that could boast a perfect game of croquet, imagines herself standing there in a bright sundress with her hand shading her eyes. Rickon is there, too, with one of his grins and the wrap of his arm around her waist, pulling her in for a kiss. She imagines what it would feel like, what the taste of his tongue might be like since she already knows the touch of it, the lightest lick on her thumb, and it makes her sigh.

“There it is again,” Mrs. Celtigar says with a shake of her ice. “Even  _Mr._ Celtigar would pick up on it, and he couldn’t take a hint if you handed it to him.”

Shireen laughs.

 

Rickon sighs. He’s playing pool at Danny’s Baboquivari with Robb, Dacey and her sister Lyra, who is laying it on thicker than concrete. It’s the third time she’s squeezed her breasts together as he lines up a shot, hands braced against the pool table’s bumper, and he wants to snap at her, tell her that acting like his ex-girlfriend is going to get her anywhere. But he’s been mostly quiet since she and Dacey showed up and he isn’t about to start talking freely now. They both of them are doing a piss poor job of hiding their grins of girl-conspiracy, as if it isn’t painstakingly obvious that this is a set-up. She’s cute enough, a suicide blonde and all bouncy and boisterous like a soft-eared puppy, but it’s the oil to his water and only makes him think of solemn blue eyes, black hair and the tumult of scars that tends to make a quiet woman all the quieter.

“So,” Robb says when they’re side by side at the bar for more beer. A single pitcher of Miller High Life doesn’t require two grown men to carry, and Rickon knows what his brother’s getting at before he even says it. “Whatcha think of Lyra?”

“She’s all right. Hey, can I get some Funyuns?” he says, nodding his thanks when the bartender unclips the bag of snacks from the wall and tosses it to him. Rickon catches it, turning to rest his back against the bar as he opens the bag and pops a Funyun in his mouth.

“’All right’? That’s it? She’s cute and obviously into you. I thought one of her tits was going to pop out the last time she leaned over the pool table. I still can’t believe you made that shot,” Robb says with a laugh.

“I  _always_  make the shot,” Rickon says absently, shaking the bag of snacks as he stares into its shallow depth, thinking about therapy that morning.

Ever since Shireen’s insistence he’s been talking more and more in group, but today was individual, and he spent the entire session going over his tour and how eerily easy it was to compartmentalize everything until he watched Wex and Osha get massacred and his life blew apart like a shitty house of cards.  _And there I was, no better than the enemy. No better but no worse, Rickon,_  EB said, but Rickon can’t be sure of that anymore.

“Hey, Ric, you okay? Where’d you go just now?” Robb says.

He looks up from his Funyuns to see Robb standing a few feet from him with the pitcher in hand and a frown on his face, and he thinks maybe the dingy old carpeting underfoot helped his brother to walk away so quietly. Rickon hastily clears his throat and pushes off of the bar to follow Robb with a shake of his head.

“Nowhere,” he says, walking back to the red pleather horseshoe booth the girls are sitting in. “I didn’t go anywhere.”

 _And ain’t that the truth,_  he thinks, because while he started to enjoy working for his family and secondarily for Shireen, it’s over now and he’s back to where he began, sitting up at all hours of the night playing on his phone or staring numbly at the television while Bran and Jojen get high beside him. And then there’s been nothing but radio silence from Shir, even though she said they were friends, much to his letdown. So whatever grounds he was gaining in his personal life are lost too. No job, no girlfriend, no friend.

“Hey handsome,” Lyra says when he stands by the table of the booth. “You want to play another round with me? Dace is all pooled out.”

“Sure,” he shrugs, tossing the bag of Funyuns onto the table when his phone buzzes in his pocket.

Rickon cannot help but grin when he sees it’s from Shireen, and he feels like a fucking idiot for the way his pulse races when he reads it.

 

**Shireen:** Hey, are you free tonight? I have a piece of furniture I need to put together.

**Rickon:** Clever thing like you can’t figure it out?

**Shireen:** Don’t make fun of me, but it’s too heavy to take out of my car by myself.

**Rickon:** I find that hard to believe, Trouble. I’ve seen you haul yourself up on a roof.

**Shireen:** Yeah but I still had you there to help me, didn’t I? :)

 

“Looks like somebody’s talking to a girl,” Lyra says.

When he looks up he realizes he’s still got that grin on his face, and his cheeks feel funny, his face feels empty when he lets it fade, and he’s expecting pouting maybe or other girl-world craziness, but she surprises him by grinning right back.

“Well, go on, who is she?” she says, sliding out of the booth, the backs of her thighs a squeak against the pleather.

Suddenly Rickon has Robb and Dacey looking over his shoulders while Lyra stands in front of him, peering over the edge of his phone. He wants to snap at Lyra and shove the lovebirds away from him, but he thinks Robb could probably kick his ass,  _knows_  Dacey could, and besides, he’s trying to come up with a reply.

“Oh, wow, so you’re still talking to that girl?” Dacey says with a nudge of her elbow into her ribs. “I figured you had a thing for her but then you clammed up and poof, nothing about her anymore. Oh, look, a flirty little smiley face.”

“What, does he like this chick?” Lyra asks. He’s got his eyes glued to the screen of his phone as his thoughts leave his head, one by one, but he can hear the switch in her voice from amusement to interest, and he wonders if she likes reality TV.

“There are suspicions,” Robb says, making Dacey laugh.

“Fuck off,” Rickon says.

“Dude, just go on and text her back. Say you’re her Obi Wan,” Robb says.

“Do  _not_  tell her that,” Dacey says, pushing Rickon’s phone down so she can lean in and glare at her boyfriend.

“Would you guys kindly shut the hell up right now? I’m trying to think,” he says, wrenching his phone out from under Dacey’s hand, stepping back a foot to get away from them, but like flies to honey they follow him.

“Try not to hurt yourself,” Lyra says dryly, and she shrugs when he lifts his gaze to drop a glare on her. “What, it’s not hard, just text her that you’ll help her. Flex your big man muscles and save the day,” she says with a Marilyn Monroe simper, another one of those breast squeezes she’s so fond of.

**Shireen:** I hate to bother you, but I already asked Gendry and he’s MIA. You’re my only hope!

“Oh my God,  _please_  would you say you’re her Obi Wan,” Robb says, and he’s practically pouting when Rickon finally glances up at him with an incredulous expression.

“I’m  _not_  telling her I’m her fuckin' Obi Wan, okay? Besides, she basically told me I’m her last option right here,” he says, pointing with a calloused finger at the most recent text.

“Oh calm down,” Lyra says. “She’s giving herself an out so she doesn’t look like she’s reaching. She’s trying to be, you know, casual about it, whatever. I mean, come on. She’s asking you to go be a big strong boy for her. It’s obvious. She’ll probably already be naked when you get there,” she says with a grin.

And now all Rickon can think of is Shireen, not naked – _well, maybe naked –_ but in that nightgown thing of hers he took home after his flashback. The silk of it is a fond memory on the skin of his palm though the faint waft of perfume is gone, and he feels a flare of guilt over keeping it.

“Jesus, he’s  _blushing,_ ” Dacey says.

Rickon gives her a dirty look that only serves to make her laugh, and he’s wishing now for less feisty company.

“Listen, sweetie,” Lyra says, snatching his phone from his grasp, twisting her body away from him and stretching her arm behind her to keep him from grabbing it back. “You stick around, drink some beer and play some pool, you’re going to get laid tonight. Would you rather hang out here or would you rather go put some furniture together?”

Lyra slowly turns back towards him, reeling in her arm so she holds the phone out between their bodies, and she lifts her eyebrows in a challenge. She’s got a heart shaped face that suddenly seems kind now when before it was foxy and sneaky, and before he can help himself he laughs. Rickon grabs his phone.

**Rickon:** On my way, Trubs

“You’re pretty cool, Lyra,” he says. “You can even have my Funyuns,” and Rickon nods to a grinning Robb and Dacey before he walks towards the door.

It’s dusk when he pulls up to her place, the mouth of the driveway the only gap between her car and his truck. He’s an intentional time wasting stretch of his arms when he finally steps out of the cab, letting the heat drape over him so he can figure out what the hell he’s going to say.  _Am I going to say anything? What the fuck am I going to say,_  he thinks.  _Sorry I kept your nightie and licked your finger, I think I might want to kiss you, I turned down a one night stand to put your stupid furniture together because that’s what I’d rather do._

“Fuckin’ A,” he mutters, pocketing his keys as he rounds the hood of his car to walk up the driveway.

But then he stops, and he smiles despite himself and his own inability to fucking articulate, because Shireen is a cutoff shorts saunter down the driveway in her bare feet. The shoulder of her billowy shirt has slipped off and the entire top hangs crooked on her body, showing off her arm when she lifts the other to comb her fingers through her hair. She grins when she sees him, and he’s got that thrill from 8th grade dances, that spike of fear and excitement when a pretty girl looks back.

“Hey,” she says with the widening of her smile, jingling her car keys in the palm of her hand. She walks over to her car as she unlocks it and he follows her the way Shaggydog follows him around the kitchen, hoping for a handout.

“Hey,” he says, a thick-tongued idiot, a moron in cargo shorts and twilight heat, and it is  _difficult,_  resisting the urge to start laughing like a nerve-struck moron. Anything to fill the awkward gaps, anything to keep himself from saying something stupid like  _I think about you all the time_ or worse,  _Do you think about me?_

“Seriously, thank you so much for coming over,” she says, and her gaze is little more than a glance here and a flit there, a lift up to his eyes before it drops down to the ground. She won’t  _look_ at him, here where the drowse of the day meets the humming edge of nighttime, and it’s impossible for him to confirm anything that Lyra hinted at, but he thinks girls are best at reading other girls, and so he sucks in a breath, fills his lungs with oxygen and pretends it’s courage.

“Listen, Shir,” he says, but she’s already talking.

“I didn’t mean to ruin your night, I just didn’t have anyone else to turn to. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t want to keep you from, you know, a hot date or anything,” she says, and her fluster could give him hope if he wasn’t hanging himself out to dry on  _I didn’t have anyone else_.

He’s never been that interested in the competitiveness of sports, but he’s never been that interested in coming in dead last, either. It makes him feel muddy and stupid, and his brain buzzes with those twitchy feelings he always used to get back in active duty, back when he was convinced he was always watched, always hunted, always judged. He is suddenly embarrassed to the point that he glances around, turning towards the street to see if anyone has witnessed this, half expecting someone to be staring, pointing, laughing at him from behind palm tree trunks and luxury cars. But there’s no one save for some guy sitting in a parked Ford Focus on his phone, and when he turns back to Shireen she’s shrugging up at him like it’s a task and an errand, something to suffer through instead of enjoy.

Rickon feels a fool.

“Now that you mention it,” he begins, because it’s crazy how easy it is, to turn tail and flee and to snap first before someone can take a bite out of you. But it’s an instant regret when he sees her frown and her face fall, the smile dropped like a lovely leaf from a tree.

“Oh, damn, I’m sorry, Ric, I didn’t- um, Jesus,” she says with a nervous titter of laughter and a shake of her head. “I didn’t mean to cut into your evening. I figured you’d tell me if you had plans.”

He sighs because it feels too shitty to be mean to her, and he is about to lift his hand to run the back of his fingers down the length of her arm, about to try it all over again and step into her when there is a pop and the immediate shatter of tempered glass behind him. It splinters with that old familiar dry crack sound and his shoulders instinctively go up when he turns around.

“Oh my God, my car,” Shireen says, but if she says anything else, Rickon does not hear her.

It happened to him more than a few times over in Iraq, where time stops between the inhale and exhale. It’s like being encased in a single drop of honey, thick and slow, an eternity between the tick and tock of the second hand on a watch, and sounds fade out to the buzzing dull roar of his pulse pounding in his ears. He usually experienced it with a weapon in his hands but now he is unarmed, staring across the street at the man pointing a gun through the open window of a Ford Focus. This is the tick. The tock comes when the thick, slow standstill explodes, ushered out by the crackling pings of bullets striking the rear window of Shireen’s car. The buzzing dies down so it can be pierced with Shireen’s scream, and then the drop of honey releases him.

“Get down, get down, get down,” he pants out, turning back to her.

Rickon bends down and wraps his arms around Shireen’s waist, turning, dragging her down to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street on the other side of her car. He lands on his back and immediately rolls so that she’s beneath him, and he slides one arm up to curl around the crown of her head, the other moving up to cradle the back of her neck and he covers her body with his own.

She is saying something but is sobbing at the same time and he cannot make it out, but he can feel it against his chest where her face is buried, the hot-breath gusts of panic that wrack her body in time to the shots fired from across the street. A bullet whistles just before impact on the side of Shireen’s car, and it’s like a hammer on metal as four more shots are fired. He glances down the lengths of their bodies, tugs her leg up when he sees it’s dangling over the curb and is halfway under the car where it could get hit if the shooter were to get out of the Ford and crouch down.

“Rickon,” she gasps out, and his name is a ragged, tear soaked flag, his shirt is a tight, suffocating stretch across his back when she clenches it at his sides, her fists stone-strong with fear.

“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” he says, over and over and over again. “I’ve got you, you’re okay,” he says, wondering which one of them he’s talking to, which one of them he’s trying hardest to convince.

 It is coming back to a hell he never had the right to leave, it is a world of now-now-now for him, though a thousand memories knit themselves together like some sort of macabre blanket that tries to suffocate him. The sound of gunfire brings him back, makes his blood sing, makes his head hurt and his mouth run dry, makes him wish he had his M16 to fire back on the shooter, makes him wish he had never been born or was already dead.  It terrifies him because he is unarmed and has only the car for cover, because all it will take is that asshole to get out of the car and cross the street and fire off a round or two into their bodies.  _Am I strong enough,_  he thinks wildly, wondering if it’s been enough pushups and planks to build enough muscle, to be a thick enough barrier to keep the bullets out of Shireen.

The discharge of a shotgun from behind him makes his shoulders jump, makes her keen out another sob, and he lifts up on his elbows, draws his head back to look down at Shireen, because he is certain this is the moment they die.  _I’m so sorry,_  he thinks as he stares wide eyed down at Shireen, at the streaks of tears on her face and the look of wounded-wild-animal terror she gives him when they lock eyes.

“No,” she whimpers.

She is rigid with fear, her muscles tense from head to the bare toes she’s got digging into his calf, her clenched hands digging like spades into his ribs, she is blue eyes that pin him, hold him still, make him wish he could go out drowning in them instead of like this. She will be his last sight on earth before he dies. Another tick. _I’m so sorry._ Another tock.  

 

The first bullet was unrecognizable to her, having never been around guns despite a life lived entirely in the southwest, and Shireen went down to the ground under Rickon’s weight thinking that somehow maybe the heat of afternoon had made her window explode. But she’s seen enough movies to understand after the second shot was fired, and with the press of Rickon above her, that was when she started to cry. Her nose was pressed hard and painfully against his sternum, one leg pinned between his knees and the other half draped out into the street before he pulled it up and over his thigh so her foot rested on his calf.  _He’s my wall,_  she thought, but then there was a loud boom that made him jerk and flinch and draw away from her.

It’s where they are now, her back in the grass and her fists in his shirt, and she stares up at him suddenly horrified that he might have been hit.

“No,” she says, unable to move with the sudden realization that he could be dying here on top of her,  _because_ of her.

It’s like she is carved from a rock, she is so immobilized, and her muscles are sore, her body already aches so profoundly, tendons like twigs ready for the snapping, but then there is another great big boom that shakes the paralysis out of her like wind snapping through a sheet. She releases his t-shirt, draws her arms up between their bodies so she can fling them around his neck and pull him back down to her, his weight a more solid crush on top of her as his elbows slide and slip in the grass, losing their purchase. Her eyes squeeze shut against the settled dusk.  _Here is where we live,_  she thinks despite it not making any sense, despite the fact that they are so fucking  _trapped_  here. But she thinks maybe, if she pulls him back she can protect him too a little bit, and so she squeezes tired muscles and thinks of funerals, how she doesn’t want to go to any more of them. Her ears ring, or maybe squeal like the sound of a car peeling out. Her eyes burn with tears. Her heart beats and she doesn’t want it to stop, not right now.

“Come on up, kids, he's gone,” someone says, tinny and far away, difficult to hear through the gunshot ring and echo in her ears, through the sheer disbelief over what is happening.

She frowns with her eyes still closed, can feel familiarity niggling at her until it dawns on her, who is speaking to them.

“M-Mrs.  _Celtigar_?” she says, more to herself than to anyone else.

Rickon, who is still crushed to her, pinned in place from the tight wind of her arms around his neck, exhales a breath against her, places his hands in the grass on either side of her, pushing up slowly, and she feels his mouth and his stubble brush against her good cheek as he cautiously turns to look behind them towards the direction of the voice.

“It’s okay, Shir,” he says, looking back down at her, his mouth inches from hers. “You’re okay, we’re okay.”

“But- But,” she says, sliding her hands down his back, half terrified of what she’ll find, but there are no rips in his shirt, no warm stickiness under her palms. “I thought- you jumped and I thought you got- oh my God, someone was  _shooting_  at us,” she says, voice hitching as another wave of sobs rises, because she’s talking about him getting shot with a bullet, a bullet from a gun.  _I’ve never even gotten a parking ticket,_  she thinks,  _and now I’ve been shot at._

“I’m okay, I didn’t get hit,” he says, pushing himself up and off of her, and Shireen’s hands scrabble at his shoulders, terrified suddenly of the loss of him, of the cold empty space that grows between them as he rises to his knees.

“No, please don’t go,” she says, tears running freely down her temples to the grass beneath her head. “I’m so scared,” she says with the voice of a scared little girl, high pitched and warbled and pathetic.

“Hey. Hey, I’m not leaving you, okay? But we have to get inside, it’s not safe out here, I don’t care how big your landlady’s shotgun is,” he says, confusing her, and he fills her empty, clutching hands with his own as he pulls her to her feet.

“Get inside the house, the both of you,” Mrs. Celtigar says once Shireen is standing. “Go on, I’ll be right behind you,” she says, likely knowing she can’t run as fast as they do, hand in hand through her front lawn and towards the front door.

It stands wide open as if it waits to usher them inside, and Rickon sprints forward, half dragging her behind him before he spins on his heel to face her, his hand still pulling so that she is tugged into him. He wraps his arms around her, and she has the rabbit-quick thud of his heart against her ear when she closes her eyes. The itch of phantom grass is a prickle on the backs of her arms and legs, the smell of his skin is warmth soaking through his shirt, the chill of the tile floor under her bare feet cold enough to make her shiver, and now she can’t stop trembling. Her knees practically knock together it becomes so violent, the fear and relief, the sudden cold and the contrasting heat of him all joining forces to make her quake.

“I’ve got you now, you’re all right. Thank Christ you’re all right,” he murmurs.

“Sit that girl down,” Mrs. Celtigar barks after the front door slams shut, and Shireen looks up just in time to see her rest what must be a shotgun against the wall of the foyer. “Go on, son, take her down the hall, she’ll know where to sit. The chair’s still probably got her indent from earlier.”

He does as she bids, taking her by the hand though in the end she winds up leading him after he tries to take a wrong turn into another wing of the house, and soon she’s sitting on the same armchair from that afternoon. Rickon sits on the armrest beside her, and not once does he let her hand go. Between their palms is peace, a sliver of something nice and calm and sane to cling to after the impossibility of what just happened.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Mrs. Celtigar says when she sees Rickon sharing her chair in so lavishly furnished a room. “There’s six other cha- oh, forget it,” she says, glancing down at their clasped hands. “I told you so, by the way,” she says to Shireen as she crosses the room towards a bamboo cabinet, and Shireen has only the haziest notion of what she means.

The room doesn’t seem so large with the drape of night effectively closing off the backyard from view, and the lamps scattered throughout the place lend a soft, cozy closeness that helps to make her feel better. The armchair she’s in is fat and soft, the armrests tall and ensconcing, and there is Rickon, her hand snared in his and resting on the thigh of his jeans, the denim a comforting rub on her wrist, but it’s still a huge ordeal to overcome, and the trembling does not go away.  _I feel like an alarm going off,_  she thinks, imagining clappers and bells, all whistles and shrill ringing.

“Now,” her landlady says, setting down two glasses of amber liquid that must be brandy or whiskey. “Tell me what the hell  _that_  was about before the cops get here.” Shireen thinks she prefers the last time Mrs. C offered her a drink.  _Jesus, that was only a few hours ago,_  she thinks, wondering how many more times her life will be torn apart in an instant. 

“I um, well. My dad died,” Shireen starts before she bursts into tears, and when she lets go of Rickon to bury her face in her hands, she has the lightest of weights when he gently rests his palm on her shoulder blade.

In the end Rickon explains it all for her as Shireen’s landlady listens intently, the beetle black of her eyes aglitter from behind her large frame eyeglasses. He starts with Stannis’s death and the initial verbal threat aimed at Shireen, then the ransacking of Shireen’s house and the disappearing will, though he does not mention that when they went looking for it in her dad’s office they did so by breaking in. And he follows up with running into Cersei, with the insanity of a drive by shooting in what is inarguably one of Tucson’s chicest neighborhoods.

“I think,” he says slowly, gazing down at her when she turns her face to look up at him. “I think someone’s been tailing you, Shir. It’s why your house was busted into when you were gone, how Mel knew to come home when we were there, how Cersei shows up at the same bar you were in. And now tonight,” he says. “Do you remember that car at all? It was a Ford Focus,” he says.

“I do,” her landlady says frankly. “I’ve seen it off and on now a dozen times or more.”

Shireen shakes her head with a bewildered frown, because how the two of them can so quickly tell a car’s make and model, much less at a time like this is beyond her, and because now her thoughts swim from the implication that she has been followed these past few weeks. It puts a twist in her stomach and a cringing hot roll of sick sensation down her spine. _Did they see me undress? Did they follow me everywhere, even to work and oh, God, Sansa and Arya’s?_

“I feel ill,” she whispers.

“I hate to say it, honey, but I don’t think you’re safe in town anymore,” Rickon says.

The flicker of hope and warmth she feels to hear the word _honey_ dies as quickly as it comes to be when she realizes he’s right, that first she was pushed out of her home and now she’s being pushed out of her city. First her mother left and then her father died, and now she’s essentially an orphan of family and homestead.

“I’ve never been so scared in my life,” she says, dropping her face back to her upturned palms, the ostrich in the sand, the scared girl hiding under the covers from the boogieman.

“I can’t say I blame you,” her landlady says. “That man was about to get out of the car, and even when he emptied his gun, it still took two shots from Mr. Celtigar’s 12 gauge to make him leave.”

 Her stomach a slosh and roil, Shireen leaps to her feet, and because she does not know where the bathroom is she crosses the room and wrenches open one set of French doors, and by the time she once more feels grass under her feet she lurches over and throws up. Tears flood her eyes and drip down to the lawn as she vomits up the sting of Bloody Mary and the sour tang of fear, and she should be embarrassed when Rickon rests a hand on her hunched over back but she isn’t. Not when he so gently pulls her hair back away from her face, the length of it held carefully like flower stems in his fist.


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/125564131913/a-world-alone-chapter-11)

Four cop cars color the dark street with a cacophony of reds and blues and the purple in between, soften the grass where he and Shireen clung to one another an hour earlier, light up the underside of palm trees and the long lengths of cypress. Onlookers stand outside with unadulterated curiosity and passionate gesticulation, the giddy bystander thrill of  _It was right here in our front yards!_ so thick in the air Rickon thinks he can taste it from here.  _You fucking idiots,_ he thinks, because they are laying claim to something that is his and Shireen’s, something neither of them want. The neighborly display does not impress him and he does not empathize with them, is happy to stay inside with Shireen as Mrs. Celtigar talks with the police and her neighbors. Her finger is pointed and her head juts forward like a turtle’s as she hollers at another old woman.

“Tell me,” he murmurs as they gaze at the scene through the dining room window, his arm around Shireen’s shoulders. “Why did I move your car and why aren’t we raking Mel over the fucking coals right now?” 

True to Mrs. C’s suspicions, the cops were called without a clear idea of what happened or who was targeted, and the six police-men and -women stand in a circle of rich residents squabbling over the mysterious man they saw, over how many gunshots they heard, over which direction they were aimed. The Ranger in him had no problem following Shireen’s orders to move the shot up Saab, park it as close to her little iron gate as he could and to turn off her porch light to hide the damage.  But now that it’s said and done, now that they’re unseen observers instead of witnesses giving their reports, the rest of him wants to know  _why._  He feels her body shift, tucked against his as it is, and he looks down to see her gazing up at him, eyes a hard, determined blue. The tremble of her chin when she talks gives it all away, though.

“She tried to kill me because I snuck into her house, Rickon, because I tried to find a piece of paper that had the truth on it. What will she do if I direct the cops to go knock on her door, send someone who’s actually  _competent_  to kill me? I mean, do you want to go through that again, except with- with someone who could- I mean, my God, I thought you were  _dying_ ,” she says.

Her voice is already rough from crying and throwing up, from the hysterical phone call to Davos on her landlady’s phone, and she already sounds like she has a bad cold when she hiccups and coughs on a sob that fights its way out. He closes his eyes with a wince and a frown, pulls her closer to him and turns his body to meet hers in a hug. She’s a chest heave and a sigh, her fingers a clutch to his shirt when she wraps her arms around him, and it reminds him of when she clung to him in the grass under death’s shadow. Before he can help himself he presses his mouth to her forehead, the black of her bangs the only thing keeping his motionless almost-kiss from her skin. There is a sweet familiar scent when he inhales, a newer sensation when her hands open, let go of his shirt, and sweep flat across his back by way of response.

“I thought we were going to die,” she whispers.

“I know,” he breathes against her forehead, because he will never forget the look in her eyes when he thought it was his last sight. “Don’t bring it back up right now,” he says, because if she starts reliving it she’ll never stop, and he wants her to have some semblance of peace for the time being. “Just make it go away for tonight; you can pick it up and look at it later, and I’ll help you, all right?” He rests his chin on her head and together they look outside through the lace of Mrs. Celtigar’s dining room curtains.

“Okay,” she says, all faded flower sad, one of her hands sliding up his spine, the other around the low of his back as she pulls him closer.

Rickon is more than happy to provide comfort right now, more than relieved that his presence seems to set her at ease, at least by some small degree, but it would be a lie to say he isn’t also being selfish, here. Fleeting desires to tear his way out of his own skin drift through him, the urge to hold his head in his hands and  _scream_  has yet to really go away, and the echo of splintering glass in his head is starting to sound an awful lot like machine gun fire from nine months ago. It’s a slippery slope, slick with old blood that never seems to dry. Yet here she is, holding him up and keeping him from falling, small thing as she is. There is strength in her still even after everything, and he is beyond grateful for it.

They watch in silence until the dragon lady herself comes stalking up the path towards the house, two of the policemen standing in her wake with their arms folded across their chests as they watch her with bemusement. The front door opens and closes with a hearty slam, and then flip flops on tile and an exasperated sigh come sweeping into the room. He and Shireen draw away from one another upon her arrival, a slow separation of touch that trails down his forearm until her hand finds his, and they lace their fingers together in unison, all equal push and squeeze.

“Get away from that window,” Mrs. Celtigar snaps, though he’s beginning to decipher her, hear the warmth through her brusque no-nonsense way of talking. “Those idiots will keep the cops around for a while with their cockamamie eye witness accounts, but soon they’ll leave and this place will be just as dangerous as it was before.”

“She’s right, come on,” Rickon says, and they follow the old woman out of the room and back to the sitting room where they waited for the cops to show up.

Shireen walks around the armchairs clustered around the coffee table in the center of the room, leads him towards the fireplace with the dusty, empty outline of a shotgun above it, and he’s got a ghost smile on his face when she deliberately chooses the long sofa on which they can sit side by side. They do so, and it’s low and uncomfortable enough to make his knees cock out much higher than hers, though he doesn’t much mind that fact when she twists her body and her leg slides under the bend of his. It is all awkward bumping of shoulders until the last vestiges of wrung out adrenaline prompt him to release her hand and sling his arm over her shoulders once more, pulling her all the closer.  _Closer,_ he thinks, because  _Farther_  holds no sway over him.

“All right, you two,” Mrs. Celtigar says, and Rickon glances over the back of the sofa to see her pick up one of the untouched whiskies on the coffee table. She walks around to take the high backed rattan chair off to the side of the fireplace and crosses her bird legs, one flip flop dangling from her brightly painted toes. “What’s your plan of action? Your girl here speaks highly of you, Rickon. She told me you’re a veteran,” she says.

 “Well, she must not have told you everything, then,” he says, thinking of broken glass and bloodstained nightgowns, waking nightmares that stick around for whenever his eyes close. But then  _My girl, my girl, my girl_ takes his thoughts for a momentary spin, and he almost smiles.

“Only the good stuff. Sense of duty and all that,” she says, sipping the neat bourbon before setting the glass on her bony knee and sitting forward.

“He’s  _all_  good stuff,” Shireen says, tiny and quiet, an indignant mouse curled up under a cat’s tail, and Rickon tips his head towards hers, murmurs a  _Thanks_ that she simply sniffs at.

“I’m sure we’re all glad to hear that,” Mrs. Celtigar says with a roll of her eyes. “Now, look, I have no problems unloading a few rounds whenever someone tries to shoot you, dear,” and Rickon smiles genuinely to hear the sentiment, is inclined to agree with her. “But if that airhead Mrs. Buckwell is going to call the police every time just so  _you_  can turn tail and avoid them, then that’s not really a good plan.”

They are all three of them silent a moment, save for the occasional sniffle from Shireen or the tap of old wedding rings against a lowball glass from Mrs. Celtigar. He thinks of his main goal, which is to get Shireen to safety, and then he zooms out, bit by bit, to put together the pieces on how to make that happen.

“She needs to get out of town. Even better, the state,” Rickon says, craning his neck to glance down at her when she sucks in and huffs out a shaking sigh. “Sorry, Shir, but it’s true. And we can’t take your car or my truck, either, so we’re going to need another way to get out.”

“ _’We’_?” she says, drawing away from him, so much so he has to prop his arm on the back of the sofa lest it drop like a limp noodle to the cushion between their thighs.

“What?” For a moment he thinks he’s fucked up somehow, invited himself on the world’s worst road trip without permission, but then there’s magic in the corner of her mouth when it curves up, in her eyes when they brighten for the first time since she was sauntering down the driveway towards him, all hip sway and fingers in her hair.

“You said ‘we,’” she murmurs, not without wonder.

“Yeah, I did,” he says, bending his elbow to bring his hand to her cheek, the back of his knuckles a brush against the scars. “I told you, I’m not going to leave you,” he says, and his words make her eyes close, make her head turn towards his touch.  _One moment, just one moment more, and I’ll-_

“Well, isn’t that a relief,” Mrs. Celtigar says. “Now could you two please  _focus_?”

Rickon tries his hardest not to glare at her, heaves a sigh of patience and ticks off everything he has so far thought of.

“I’m thinking we’ll pack your up some of your stuff right now and I’ll get Bran to- no, wait, they might have tailed you to my place, they’ll know those cars too. Okay, so I’ll get Robb to pick us up. But we can’t do it out on your street, they might be back already,” he says.

They listen as he makes verbal notes on what they should do, how they can sneak through people’s yards to the nearby Himmel Park a few blocks away, steering clear of the streetlights to stay as shrouded in darkness as possible. They nod mutely as he says they’ll go to his parents’ house, and if they’re followed they’ll drive to the nearest police station to scare them off.

“The only problem is I don’t know where to go after we touch base with my folks,” he says. “I guess we could just go to a motel. California, maybe,” he muses.

“Mel is from California. San Diego or LA, I can’t remember,” Shireen says, once more tucked under his arm.

“Good,” Mrs. Celtigar says, knocking back the rest of the whiskey before uncrossing her legs and standing.

The sight of so small and deceptively frail a creature with so much energy makes Rickon feel the exhaustion of their ordeal all the more acutely. Suddenly he feels the old man, and his lag in hearing comprehension adds to that.

“Wait,  _good?_ ” he says, and they watch, their heads turning as one, as Mrs. Celtigar leaves the room. “Good?” he repeats, looking down at Shireen when she shifts and gazes up at him.

“Believe me, I have no idea. She’s an enigma,” she says with a weak chuckle and a shake of her head.

If he feels tired she must be weary to the bone; she’s still barefoot and there are grass stains on the back of her white top, some gauzy and translucent thing that makes her look all the more scooped out and haunted. He wants to  _cover_ her, dig around for a blanket though it’s almost August, pull her in his arms and bend his body around hers. And he knows now, beyond a doubt, how desperately he wants to kiss her.

“Are you all right? You look worn out, Trouble,” he says, lifting his free hand to brush her bangs away from her eyes, and the pale of her forehead is a clammy cool that confirms his suspicions.

“Never tell a woman she looks tired, Hooligan,” she says, the thin edge to her voice like the hem on a threadbare handkerchief, but then she smiles, too exhausted for thrust and parry, and her eyes drop from his, her lashes black fans against her cheeks. “And I liked honey more,” she murmurs, all shy avoidance and diverted gaze, though she stays here, tucked in tight against him.

“Hmm?” he says with a confused frown, wondering when she ate honey since everything happened, considering she hasn’t been out of his sight, not even to vomit up all of her anxiety in the back yard.

But then she lifts her eyes to him, uncertainty and risk in the tilt of her head, a gamble and a hope there when she raises her eyebrows only just. He is about to shake his head but then he  _remembers_ , his slip of the tongue and the loosening of his thoughts, how that term of endearment came tripping out of his mouth before he could help himself, before he could kick himself for carelessness. Rickon inhales sharply, breathes out an  _Ah,_  and smiles, because here is some confirmation, finally. He pushes her bangs back again and leans forward until his forehead touches hers before he lets her hair sift away from his touch.

“So did I,” he says quietly. They are kissing close now, and he can smell the clean sting of her mouthwash, can feel the brush of her nose against his, and when her eyes close he does the same. “So did I,” he repeats in case she missed it, in case he only thought it and forgot to say it, because he’s sick and tired of them just passing each other.

“Oh,” she says, tipping her face up to his, and now they share the same breath, here. He hears heavy patters that make him think it’s raining, those fat slow drops of summer rain on the roof above them, warm things that might heat up her blood if he cannot. The lulling stuff of dreams, sweet ones he’s not had the pleasure of enjoying for so long he cannot remember them. A single small stretch of his neck and it’s done.

“I  _knew_  I still had all of this stuff,” Mrs. Celtigar says, flip flops flip-flapping as she slaps her way back into the room. “Mind’s as sharp as a tack, I don’t care what that ninny Beryl says,” she says.

“Jesus,” Rickon mutters, dizzy when he opens his eyes and lifts his head, his heart racing for altogether different reasons than it had when they were outside.

“Never mind the Lord just now; here’s the keys to your new house,” Mrs. Celtigar says, tossing something on the sofa cushion beside Shireen.

“What do you mean,” Shireen says, pulling away from him to pick them up.

 _All these fucking keys,_  he thinks, rubbing his hand across his mouth and chin, over his eyes and into his grown out hair.

“Mr. Celtigar and I bought a house down in Rocky Point about thirty years ago. Tucked away in all the rentals now. It’s off season so you’ll be some of the only gringos dumb enough to go down there, but hell, gringos have done dumber things down there, so it shouldn’t make you stick out too much,” she says.

She leans over and hands Rickon an old laminated map that looks like a placemat with cartoon images of restaurants and hotels. There are instructions written in permanent marker in the upper corner with an arrow pointing to the big balloon letters that say LAS CONCHAS off to the right of the old port. He’s been there a handful of times in his life, twice as a kid and a few times in high school, when he could pass for 18 at 17 and they didn’t do much carding in bars.

“No, you can’t,” Shireen says, sitting up to lean over her knees towards Mrs. Celtigar, and it’s all so damned new, these moments of  _I liked honey more_ and the way she melts into him like cream in coffee whenever they’re close, but still he lets his hand drift down her back before dropping it to the sofa. 

“I beg your pardon, but I  _can,_  and I am,” the landlady says, ruffled feathers and poufed white hair.

“You’ve already almost gotten yourself into trouble for me, though. For us,” she says, glancing over her shoulder at him, scars and a wistful look he returns with a nod.

“You’re the closest thing I have to a granddaughter, a daughter, really, since I never had one of those,” she says. “So if you’re going to let your young man save your life then the least you can do is let me put you up for a few weeks. So long as hot shot over here keeps his eye on you.”

Rickon leans forward, quick as he can, and rests a hand on Shireen’s knee, giving it a squeeze.

“You got yourself a deal.”           

 

Shireen has a memory from when she was a little girl, before her father made his money and they were living in a small house in the center of town instead of high up in the foothills, back when they only had a washing machine and her mother hung everything out on lines in the backyard. It was a hassle, her mother always said, but one benefit of that scorching desert sun, that unwinking scald of light, was how quickly everything dried. It was different during the monsoon season, though, that daily showdown with the rains. She remembers sitting outside one afternoon in a plastic kiddie pool with her My Little Ponies, gazing up at the sky as it filled with clouds. First white things that looked like big balls of cotton, then dark, deep, ominous things that blotted out the usually relentless sun, blackening the sky like soot on a white stone. In mere minutes the rain and cold wind came, and Shireen hopped out of the pool, looking back at the rows of laundry, in particular her parents’ bedsheets. What had been big blousy squares of white were suddenly drenched and gray, nearly translucent from so much water, no longer wind-licked but heavy, drooping so low they nearly touched the muddying ground below.

That’s how she feels now.

Exhausted, worn out, see through and useless, a sopping heap of woman made heavy from so many tears. Rickon has largely been the one at the wheel of her actions, urging her to pack her bags and bring whatever she needed, guiding her through her own neighborhood with his hand clasping hers, flagging down Robb when he pulled up on the edge of Himmel Park with only his fog lights on. It is Rickon who leads the way now into his parents’ house through the side door, her suitcase in his left hand, his own duffle bag in his right.

The room is a small office with a wall to wall desk, the surface of which looks like a cross between a junk drawer and a police station’s evidence room. There’s the computer, mouse and keyboard, and there are scissors and notepads, a random pile of rubber bands and a small stack of receipts, and there are several empty clips that belong in guns – oh, how she shudders when she remembers – and walkie-talkies, Bluetooth headsets and a few things that, upon a closer look, turn out to be tasers. On the other side of the office is a Murphy bed that’s been pulled out and made up with floral sheets and a brightly patterned quilt, and Rickon tosses their luggage on it before he turns to her.

They stand there a moment, Rickon’s hands a light weight on her shoulders, as Robb closes the outside door and deadbolts it before turning towards them.

“I’ll go scope out the scene in there,” he says, and the two brothers nod to one another as the eldest crosses the room, his limp barely discernable now, and he closes the office door behind him.

“You okay?” Rickon says once they are alone, his hands a skate over the caps of her shoulders.

“So far as I can tell,” Shireen says with a nod, her eyes half closing when he lightly squeezes her arms before letting his hands slide down to her wrists, where they then fall to his sides.

These soft moments, this bright new thing between them, all of it is still so incredible to her she has half a mind to disbelieve it, and so she anchors it in her heart as truth by stepping towards him. Her stomach does the roller coaster drop when she brushes his jaw with her fingers and he closes his eyes, tips his head into the touch like a purring cat, like a lost little boy, like all those daydreams of him she’s been having lately.

“Are  _you_  all right? You- I mean, you act like nothing really happened but it did, to you as much as it did to me.”

“I’ve been shot at before,” he murmurs, and because his eyes stay closed she has the courage to press her palm to his cheek.  _It’s all so new, new, new,_ she thinks, watching the knit of his brow, the way his mouth opens for a moment as he hunts for his words. “But you haven’t. You’ve just gone through something I know all about. I can keep my shit together right now, so I am. You need me so here I am,” he says, opening his eyes.

“Nobody’s ever done anything like that for me, what you did out there,” Shireen whispers, glancing to the door when she hears the footsteps approaching the other side of it. “I can’t- words can’t  _express,_ ” she starts, but the knock on the door makes her put a pin in it, and they turn to see Robb open the door and poke his head through the small gap he makes.

“Hey, you guys, everyone’s real antsy out here waiting. Mom’s practically pulling her hair out she wants to see you so bad,” Robb says. “I know you guys probably want some peace and quiet, but I guess that’ll happen on the drive down there.”

“We’ll be there in a sec,” Rickon says, looking back at Shireen when Robb closes the door again. “Get ready for a shit storm,” he says to her, and before she can saying anything more he moves her hand from his cheekbone to his mouth, kisses her palm before pulling her towards the door.

The room opens onto a dark, short hallway with a laundry room off to the left and a small bathroom to the right, and when they step into the kitchen it’s a room of warm light, soft earth tones and the smell of something delicious cooking. She hasn’t eaten since lunch and suddenly her hunger hits her like dynamite carving out a mountainside. It is quiet for a moment, with Sansa and Sandor sitting on the sofa in the open floor TV room to the right of the kitchen, Robb and Ned standing in the center of the room with Arya between them, and Catelyn by the stove with an oven mitt on her right hand.

In an instant the place erupts with voices and activity, when it’s a swarm of people approaching, when Catelyn flings the oven mitt to the floor and hauls her youngest son in her arms so hard Rickon’s hand is wrenched free from hers.

“You went to war,” she says with watery hitches in her voice. “You went to war and came back but then you almost get _killed_ here in _town_ ,” she says, equal parts relieved and angry and scared, the infamous braided voice of parents with grown children.

 _Except mine,_  she thinks, remembering the sound of her mother’s indifference, and she clasps her hands and looks down at the floor. But before she can sink in self-pity Arya barrels into her, wrapping her arms around her neck as if she intends to wrestle her to the ground instead of hug her. Momentarily stunned, it takes Shireen a second to gather her wits and hug her friend in return, only to be hugged from the side by Sansa.

“Oh my God, we’ve all been so fucking  _worried,_ ” Arya muffles into her shoulder and hair, drawing back and holding Shireen at arm’s length. She gives her the up and down, clearly looking for bullet holes or injury.

“I’m okay, thanks to Ric,” she says, looking up to where Catelyn is doing a similar inspection of her son, but at Shireen’s words she looks over.

“Oh, you poor thing, I can’t believe this _happened_ to you kids,” she says, abandoning Rickon to his father’s embrace as she rounds on Shireen.

It takes her by utter surprise, being pulled into a mother’s arms, and before she fully comprehends what’s happening she’s got the smell of Boucheron perfume and the soft brush of a blouse all around her. They are such motherly sensations that tears prick her eyes, because she can’t remember the last outfit her mother wore before walking out, has no idea what signature scent her mother wears these days.

“Are you sure you’re all right? I’ve got enchiladas warming in the oven if you’re hungry. And oh, we’ve got the bed all made up in Ned’s office for you. It’s almost midnight. There’s no way you all are leaving the  _country_  before a square meal and a night’s sleep. I _insist_ ,” Catelyn says firmly, shaking her head when Shireen makes a feeble protest. “Come on, now, sit down and let me fix you a plate.”

And so she is pulled through the kitchen to the dining room table where once she sat at the head as a prospective client, where now she sits between Rickon and Arya in front of a home cooked meal.

“I’m going to orthopedics in a few days to get work clearance by my doctor,” Robb says between pulls of beer and bites of food. “And I’ve texted my border patrol buddy. He’s going to move his schedule around and try and meet them down there once they’re settled in at Las Conchas.”

“I don’t want you pushing yourself, but I have to admit I’m relieved to know you’ll be down there too,” Ned Stark says, pushing his enchilada around in red sauce before cutting off a piece with the side of his fork.

“Because San and I are chopped liver, I guess,” Arya says, tapping her fork against her plate as she fastens a stare on her father. “We’re gonna be there too, you know.”

“No, it’s because  _you_  two could very well be targets as well. Shireen lived with you for a few weeks, and if Rickon’s hunch is correct they likely did a lot of recon on your house as well. The more potential targets there are, the more detail there should be. Which, and that reminds me,” Ned says, turning from his youngest daughter to the scarred man sitting on the other side of the table. “You’re sure you’re all right with this? Getting this sort of thing sprung on you at ten o’clock at night can’t be an easy thing to swallow.”

“If Sansa’s going, then I have  _no_  problem swallowing it,” Sandor says, elbows on the table and napkin a wad in his hands over his empty plate. “I’ve got the background for it, anyways. I’m happy to do it, Eddard.”

“I appreciate it, believe me. This is, huh,” Ned says with a shake of his head as he sits back in his chair, the window behind the table framing him in a square of black night sky. “It’s unprecedented, to be honest. We’ve  _never_  had this sort of thing happen. I still can’t quite believe it,” he says.

Shireen takes a sip of ice water after setting her fork down on her half empty plate and bows her head. She wishes she had never overheard Mel, wishes she had never mouthed off to her about the will or even agreed to reading it so soon after her dad’s funeral. She has brought down this wrath on herself and now on other people, people she cares so deeply about that it’s starting to hurt her heart. The painful spotlight-in-your-eyes guilt pins her in place, and it’s like the slow death of an insect beneath someone’s heel, the tight squeeze of self-loathing that makes her drop her hands in her lap.

“Hey,” Rickon says to her left, his hand snaking under the table to find hers, here where they wring themselves. She imagines being wrung out the way her mother wrung out those monsoon-drenched sheets, wonders how many tears would come raining out of her. “Hey,” he repeats, lower and closer as he leans into her. “I know what you’re doing. I’m a fucking  _expert_  on what you’re doing right now, so just don’t. You didn’t do this. You’re not responsible for other people’s reactions, okay?”

“He’s right, sweetie,” Sansa says from across the table, and when Shireen lifts her eyes the    redhead has a soft smile waiting for her, the slightest shake of her head. “Please don’t worry. We’ve all been doing this a long time, we know what we’ve gotten ourselves into. And more importantly, we’re your  _friends._  We’re here for you now because we want to, not because we mailed you an invoice. Okay?”

“Okay,” she says with a nod and a smile, with the squeeze of Ric’s hand in her lap before he lets go to finish his dinner. “I just can’t thank you all enough. You especially,” she says, letting her gaze drift his way. “Thank you,” she murmurs.

For a moment it’s as if the rest of the room drops away, the table full of friends and family, the art on the walls and the dark evening outside. He inhales, opens his mouth as if to speak, closes it. Finally Rickon nods, glances down to his plate as he scoops food on his fork. When he looks back up at her, he’s smiling, less mystery there than there used to be, now that she knows him, and it makes her smile back.

“Anytime, honey.”

 

“Hey, little brother,” Sansa says, dropping down in a puddle of sundress beside him where he sits by the pool. She lowers her feet in the water where they glow white like his do below the rolled up cuffs of his jeans.

“Is she all right?” he says, blowing cigarette smoke in the opposite direction before looking at his sister.

“She’s okay. I got her a set of towels so she’s taking, in her words, the longest, hottest shower in her life. Poor thing,” she sighs, bracing her hands on the edge of the pool as she gazes down at the wiggle of her underwater toes.

“I should go inside in case she needs anything,” he says, lifting his knees to swing his feet up and out of the pool, but his sister stills him with a hand to his leg.

“I have a feeling she’ll be in there a long time,” she says. “You can take a moment to relax yourself.”

He frowns but does as she suggests, lets his feet fall back in with a low splash that licks the denim bunched up above his calves. There is a low, distant rumble of thunder, and a long moment afterwards the streak and fork and stab of lightning off to the south, and he wonders what Rocky Point’s rainy season is like, wonders how horrifically humid and gross it will be down there.

“You and Arya are really going to come with us?” he says after a long while, and when he glances up his sister smiles and nods.

“Yeah, we are. Dad sort of insisted on it before we managed to tell him it was our plan all along. I guess Gendry is covering someone’s shift right now so they’ll take over his until he comes back. Sandor’s coming too,” she says with a girlish smile, the dip of her head hiding her face when the red of her hair falls free from behind her ear.

“I heard,” he says with a smoke cloud chuckle. “If someone had told me, my first day of group, that my prima donna sister would fall for the scary dude sitting next to me, I would have called them a lunatic.”

Sansa laughs, the sound of a wind chime, light and airy here in the thick of midnight, the color of wine blushes, warm and tingling.

“Check that, fall in  _love_  with the scary dude,” he says, grinning when she pushes his shoulder.

“Shut up, Ric. He’s- I mean, there’s just something _about_ him,” she says, shaking her hair out of her face as she looks up at the night sky. Rickon looks up too, wondering what parts of their lives are mapped out up there, futures and endings, both doomed and happy. “Besides, you’re one to talk,  _honey._  I feel like I could get electrocuted if I walked through one of those looks you two always seem to share. Did um, did something happen between you two? After 47 Scott, maybe? I saw you two leave together,” she says.

“No, not then,” he says, telling her briefly about Cersei, though he leaves out their conversation in his truck. “Although, tonight at her landlady’s house I almost- we almost kissed,” he says, feeling suddenly stupid for telling this sort of thing to his big sister of all people. He’d rather tell the bozos in group than his family, but there it goes, slip-sliding out of him like water down a rockface.

“Well that’s wonderful. We’ve all been waiting for it, believe me,” she says, bumping his shoulder again, this time with her own, and he huffs a chuckle when she rests her head against his. “I wanna say that you’re happy. At least happier than you were, am I right?”

He thinks about it. The easy calm of her, the soothe of her words and her voice, the way she takes him as is and doesn’t ask for a costume change, doesn’t want him to slip into old skins and pretend they’re real. And more recently there is the lightness of her hands in his and her touch on his face, the warm realness of her when he holds her, now that he’s allowed to.

“Happier, yeah,” he says. “You know, for just getting shot at, and everything.”

“Rickon,” she says, letting his name trail off into another sentence. “Are you okay? I mean,  _really_ okay after everything? I know you’re all worried about Shireen and everything, but have you checked in on  _you_?”

“I’m all right. It could have gone so much worse,” he says, and even though he’s staring down at the aquamarine glow of his parents’ pool and the pale of his submerged feet, he sees soldiers falling, blood on sand, the twist of black hair draped over a lifeless face. “So much worse,” he says, and they both of them look up and behind when the sliding glass door opens.

“Just checking,” Sandor says, his body half in and half out, a balance over the threshold.

“Come on out and join us, baby,” Sansa calls, richly voiced, thick like cream and just as sweet now that it’s got Sandor’s ear to curl up in.

He’s a black shadow in an unlit yard when he does as she bids, and it makes Rickon smile, this sister of his with her beast for a love. He must know her well, too, seeing that he’s already barefoot, padding his way across the cool decking to make his way to his prize. The dark and the light, side by side once Sandor lowers into a squat before sitting beside her, two sides to the same coin that meet in the middle where white and black soften to grey. It makes him think of _her_ , makes him miss _her_. There’s another distant boom of thunder, the sounds crawling closer on the underside of clouds, and it sounds like hunger to Rickon, who feels empty now, all of a sudden.

“I’m gonna go in,” he says after he exhales his last drag. He leans back to stub out his cigarette in an empty flower pot, pulls his feet out of the pool to stand and bends down to unroll his jeans.

“She’s okay, Ric. Stay if you want,” Sansa says, leaning against the strength of Sandor to gaze up at him, her face lit up with the dancing water-ripple light from inside the pool.

“Maybe I’m not going in for her,” he says, nodding when Sandor salutes him. “Maybe I’m going in for me.”

And he does. He checks the office first, finding it empty save for their two suitcases, two little lives all packed up and ready for whatever the hell’s coming down the pike. A glance down the hall tells him his sister was right; the bathroom door is closed and there is a thin band of light shining from underneath it. He uses his time wisely, quickly shucking out of his jeans and shirt, and he stands in his boxer briefs as he rummages through the bag Bran packed for him until he finds his pajama pants and an undershirt.

He’s changed and checking his email by the time the bathroom door clicks open, and he swivels around in his dad’s office chair in time to see her walk in with wet hair over her shoulder and a little toiletry bag in her hands, her legs bare beneath a pair of cotton shorts. Suddenly the room fills with everything between them: the electricity his sister mentioned; unclaimed kisses and the tremor of a near-tragedy; quiet nighttime talks and the feel of her scars; the taste of her thumb and that look in her eyes. And then she smiles, leans over to set her toiletry bag on top of her suitcase, and when she does he sees the swing of his dog tags chain under the loose tank top she’s wearing. And that makes it unbearable.

“Christ,” he says.

“Are you okay?” she asks, frowning when he stands up from the chair and crosses the room.

“No. Not yet,” he says, cupping her face in his hands, and if he thought he might have to encourage her he is wrong, because she’s ready for him when he bows his head and kisses her.

He has had his mind reel, before, that side-tip spin of vertigo that he’s got now, like the first time he did a helicopter drop, the world a race below the dangle of his combat boots as he waited for the chopper to stop. But this, this is different, though he still feels like he’s about a mile up in the air.

She’s got her arms around his shoulders and her hands in his hair, he’s got the shower-warm weight of her in his arms when he lifts her up off her toes, and it’s a strange twist on the feeling of relief to finally have her here on his mouth, the sweet of her flooding him when she touches her tongue to his. It’s makes his heart hurt, good as she feels, good as she tastes, because a want that goes this deep can’t just be uprooted with a single kiss.

Shireen makes a fist in his hair, holding him as surely as he holds her, and behind his closed lids his eyes roll back in his head when she whimpers and sighs. It’s a sad moment when he finally sets her down, returns her to the earth that’s lucky to have her. He loosens his arms around her, lets go of her waist to hold her face once more before the kiss breaks, anything to keep riding the wave of sensation, the one that can never be repeated once it’s over.

“Rickon,” she breathes, her damp bangs pressed between their foreheads. “Oh,” she sighs, fingers in his hair, fingers along his jaw, her thumb a ghost ride at the corner of his mouth.

“Yeah, ‘Oh _,’_ ” he says, dumbed up and drugged up from the brands she’s left all over him, nails against his scalp and the weight of her forearm against the nape of his neck, the press of her breasts when he dragged her close.

“I um, you’re going to leave now, aren’t you? To go sleep on the couch or something. I know how you like the couch,” she says.

He laughs, lifts his head from hers to sweep her hair back, the sift of his fingers sending up the scent of berries and cream, flowers and some other bewitching scent. She watches him, he can feel it, and there is another one of those whip crack sparks when he looks up from her hair to her eyes.

“It wasn’t the couch I liked, Shireen,” he says, slow and deliberate.

“Well, then, I don’t- _ohhh,_ ” she says, her hands finding his chest, two light weights there like she’s testing him out, making sure it’s real here, between them.

He nods, drops his gaze to her collarbone where his fingers slide from the back of her neck to underneath the chain she wears, though he doesn’t have to pull on it to know what hides in the valley between her breasts. His heart is a heavy thud at the thought, and he clears his throat to push it away.

“Well, then, will you stay? Here, I mean, with me. I don’t want to be, um, I just want you to stay, if that’s okay.” Puzzle pieces from before start to notch together as he watches her, as he lets the kiss dry on his mouth and _knows_ her now, the nervous flit and flick of her gaze, the way she bites her lip, all these things that confused and muddled, that soothe him now, delight, please, torture him so exquisitely.

Rickon smiles.

“Absolutely,” he says.

“You risked your life for me,” she says later. “You saved my life today, but you _risked_ yours.”

It is some small hour of the morning that still bleeds black from behind the wooden slat blinds. He’s dozing, half asleep and not at all bothered by that fact, buzzing as he is from kissing her, from the weight of her head on his chest, from the sprawl of her drying hair over his shoulder and the arm he’s got around her, from the tangible knowledge that she’s safe and sound and _here_.

“I know I did, and I’d do it again,” he murmurs with his eyes closed. He frowns when she lifts her head, smiles when she takes him by the chin, makes him tilt his head towards her for the sweetness of a kiss, close-mouthed and perfect. He will dream of sugar tonight, if he ever makes it to sleep.

“Well, I know something you _don’t_ know,” she says, resting her head back on his chest.

“Tell me,” he says, licking the taste of her off his lips, because it is Shireen, because it is all still so new.

The ceiling fan lazes overhead, the whir of it a lull, the soft stretch of Shireen’s legs against his a comfort, an anchor for him to cling to if the sea of his dreams turns bitter at some point. She sighs, exhales and slides her arm across his chest, tucking her fingers between his arm and his ribs. Finally she speaks, soft and strong, low like honey. _Honey,_ he thinks.

“I’d do the same for you.”

 


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [PIcset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/126292310683/a-world-alone-chapter-12)
> 
> [Ned](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/126386202277/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)
> 
> [Catelyn!](http://bex-morealli.tumblr.com/post/126385435457/a-world-alone-by-jillypups-for-willowfae82)

Sandor has spent the morning filling out tax forms and signing waivers, Ned Stark motionless on the other side of the smaller kitchen table save for a bite of toast or a sip of coffee. It’s blessedly overcast today, a pewter sky made entirely of flat bottomed clouds, and it lends a softness to a house that’s already quiet, seeing as it’s just him and Eddard who are up. He slept like shit in Bran’s old bed, his feet hanging off the edge of the mattress, the wood footboard digging into his ankle bones and cutting off circulation, and it’s why he’s been up nearly two hours already.

The kitchen and den sprawl themselves out in one room, an open floor plan stretch of warm-toned floor tile, one half of the room a sea of granite countertops, the other a copse of two forest green sofas and a loveseat.  He can hear the ticking of the small grandfather clock on a shelf above the television, the scratch and press of his pen’s nib as he signs the last form, the creak of Eddard’s chair as he gets to his feet.

“Want another cup of coffee?” Sansa’s father asks, gesturing towards Sandor’s mug before he heads into the kitchen.

“I’m good, thanks,” he says, setting down the pen pushing the papers to the center of the table with a sigh and a shake of his right hand.

“I’m indebted to you for this,” Eddard says over the pour of coffee. “Now it’s my kids we’re talking about here. And it’s not just the usual risks these detail jobs can come with, but  _proven_  intent to kill. Rickon was targeted too, for chrissakes. My girls could be next,” he says, his voice strained as his words die on the exhale of a sigh.

Sandor scoots his chair back and twists to look over the back of it, stands when he sees the look on the man’s face. He takes his nearly empty mug in hand and walks around the counter, leans against the sink across from where Ned stands by the coffeemaker.

“I told you, Ned. I won’t let those women out of my sight. I know there’s the issue of carrying weapons across the border, but it won’t be an issue for me _._ I can get creative,” he says. He’s been in therapy for enough years to be able to say such a thing without being mired with memories. He has put enough of his demons to rest to not miss them.

“The current situation down there isn’t optimal,” Ned says after a moment. “There’s still a lot of lawlessness with the gangs, the drugs, the coyotes. Although to be fair, that might be to our advantage; Rickon says the man who fired on them was a bad shot and came unprepared. Could be this Mel doesn’t have men experienced enough or reckless enough to saunter down to Rocky Point with a junk gun.” Eddard Stark sips his coffee, eyebrows raised as he looks at Sandor.

“If Shireen’s inheritance is as large as it’s been implied, and this woman has current access to even a fraction of it, she can afford to hire better men. Or worse, depending on the side you’re standing on,” he says. He has been to war twice. He knows that being called hero or villain only depends on whoever’s doing the talking.

“It could be dangerous.”

“I can be dangerous, too,” Sandor says with a shrug, because there are some skill sets that never grow over with weeds, no matter how many slain demons push daisies beneath them.

Ned inhales long and deep as he regards Sandor. There’s only maybe 15 years between them, a surprise to both of Sansa’s parents when he met them earlier that month, but it’s not wary suspicion in Eddard’s eyes anymore, not now. It is frank appraisal, scrutiny and assessment, a final lingering judge of character, and Sandor gazes back unafraid, unconcerned, because  _This is it,_ he thinks.  _This is all I am, so feast your eyes on it._

“Good,” he finally says with a single nod. “I don’t mind admitting that it’s not my first choice for Sansa, the dangerous guy as you say, but current circumstances require it, and you seem to genuinely care about her,” he says.

Sandor wants to laugh at this understatement, this lackluster way to describe how he’s felt since clapping eyes on Sansa Stark. Even when she gasped at the gnarl of scars that rope the up and down of his left cheek the first time she met him, when she made careless haste to overcorrect her reaction. Beauty is easy to ensnare, but the mingle of sad and sweet in her eyes, that was what woke him up, as one wolf does another when it stirs in the den.

“Very much so,” he says with careful emphasis, finishing his coffee and setting the mug behind him in the sink. Part of him wants to remind Ned that his daughter is 30 years old and capable of making her own decisions, that she’s matched her older brother divorce for divorce and knows better now what she wants. The other part of him keeps his mouth shut, because Sansa needs no one to speak for her.

 _Come on, tough guy, I’m not leaving_ you _here without a ride, either_ she said with a determined lift of her chin, and just like that he was led out of the bar like a stray dog, his leash made up of auburn hair and low slung jeans.

“I have to say, it took Catelyn and me by surprise when you were able to so quickly drop everything for a woman you haven’t known long. There’s significant risk, the least being to your job, the most to your well-being,” Ned says with a glance down to the mug in his hands. “I always think I can handle more caffeine these days, but I just can’t.”  He crosses the kitchen, sets his half empty mug by Sandor’s in the sink.

“That’s why I turned down your offer for another cup,” Sandor says dryly, making Ned huff a laugh, and the two of them pause at the first audial signs of the house waking up, the click of a door and the murmur of voices. He’s heard one of those voices enough these days in therapy to recognize it, and Sandor does his best to hide a grin. “As for my dropping everything for a woman I hardly know, sometimes the security detail happens before the relationship starts, and sometimes it happens after.”

Ned looks up at the sound of a shuffle coming from the little hall that runs back to his office, and the small, amused shake of his head makes Sandor turn to see it for himself. They are tousled and drenched with exhaustion, all tentative cling to one another with her pinky finger locked around his thumb. They are all red-eyed ragged with how twisted Rickon’s pajama pants are, how a strap of Shireen’s top hangs off her shoulder. Sandor sees a telltale chain around her neck, comes close to rolling his eyes before phrases like  _young love_ roll past him, and for now he hides his amusement. Christ knows they’ve had a rough night.

“Point taken,” Ned mutters when Rickon kisses Shireen’s temple. “Good morning, you two,” he says with an exaggerated clearing of his throat. “I figured you’d sleep in your old room, Ric; your mother made up the bed in there.”

“I grew out of it,” Rickon says, squeezing his hand around Shireen’s little finger before releasing her so he can get them coffee, and either he is too tired to notice his father’s raised eyebrows or he does not care.

Sandor snorts a laugh.

“Grew out of what,” says a dulcet voice from behind him, and he turns in time to see Sansa round the corner into the kitchen, all bird on a windowsill, sunlight in a rain puddle, butter under the tongue.

“His childhood bed, and I am inclined to agree with him,” he says, dropping his voice the closer she gets to him.

She is already dressed for the day as he is, and she looks delicious in another one of those sundresses that hangs loose on the body, and she stands there with a look in her eyes like she’s a gift already half unwrapped. Her hair is unbound by ponytails or braids and his fingers itch for it. He’s already reminding himself that her father stands mere feet away when she opens a cabinet, reaches up for a glass and turns to him with a sympathetic smile.

“Poor thing,” she murmurs, leaning into and around him to fill her glass with water from the filtered spigot beside the main faucet. Sansa straightens and smiles, a delightful, cruel thing that dances between innocuous and orchestrated. “You probably outgrew a twin bed  _years_  ago, I’d wager,” she murmurs, cocking her hip out to lean against the sink beside him, her body angled in and close enough to reach out and grab.

“Oh, hell,” Ned says with the labored sigh of an outmatched father, and he mutters excuses on his way out of the room, things like  _I bet the paper’s been delivered_ and  _I’ll just go check on your mother_ a dull echo in the otherwise quiet house as he crosses the front room and disappears down the bedroom hallway off in the eastern wing of the house.

It takes Sandor only a moment to place his hand on the small of Sansa’s back, and she has just enough time to set down her glass of water before he pulls her in and up and flush against his chest. She’s the taste of toothpaste and mint lip balm when he kisses her, the smell of that lotion she puts on her face, the same she left at his house two nights ago, the same he has since memorized. He feels the expansion of her ribs on the inhale before the lovely rush of exhale against his mouth, the taste of  _linger_  there between their teeth. She rests her hand lightly on his scars, and it is enough to wrench him from this calm she drops him in. It’s like having his clothes ripped off, being stripped completely and utterly bare in front of a crowd of strangers. He’s only just able to register relief that her father isn’t still standing here.

“Sansa,” he starts, drawing his head back, tipping his face away from the intimate touch, something she’s only done in his bed or hers when he is already naked, when he is already half prepared. It is not something he wants to acknowledge in the light of day, not so early in the morning, not when there are twenty years of loathing and denial heaped up like snow on a front porch.  _There is no entry here,_  he wants to say.

“Oh hush,” she says, plowing through it all, her manicured nails a light drag through the six day beard he knows is greying. “Nobody cares, Sandor. Nobody who’s here, anyways,” she says, kissing him again, palm to his scars again.

When he looks over he sees it’s true. Rickon and Shireen’s backs are presented as they pour themselves coffee, Rickon a tired nod when he turns to get cream from the fridge and nothing more.  _There are two worlds here right now,_  he thinks when Shireen looks up and smiles at Ric, holds out her mug so he can doctor the contents for her.  _Theirs and ours._  He exhales through his nose with a shake of his head, can still feel the ghost of Sansa’s fingers on his cheek.

“I see dad had you sign off, huh,” Sansa says, and he sends his gaze in the direction of hers, over his shoulder to where the tax forms and waiver still are in the center of the little table. “You didn’t have to do that, Sandor, not for just a little trip down to Mexico.”

“Your father doesn’t half ass stuff, you know that better than I do. The man’s got too much integrity to pay me under the table, and he wouldn’t accept my coming along without paying me, no matter how much I assured him that I have plenty of PTO saved up.”

“You’re hired on with Stark Security now?” Shireen asks.

Her voice is nearly as torn up as his, likely from all the crying, and when Sandor looks at her it’s with more than an ounce of sympathy. She looks like grief walking on fawn’s legs, a slump of sorrow against Rickon’s side as the two of the sip their coffee in unison. They are two peas in a pod, two lost souls cut from the same cloth when Rickon closes his shadowed eyes and turns his head to rest his chin on the top of her head. They look like rain stained statues guarding crypts in a graveyard.

“For the time being I am, yes,” Sandor says, gentle as he can.

“Because of me,” Shireen says, half a question, half a crestfallen statement.

“No. Rickon is here because of you,” he says, and at the sound of his name Rickon opens his eyes, has some soft utterance for her that is too low to hear. Sandor settles his gaze on Sansa as he finally reaches out to slide his fingers through the length of her auburn hair. He smiles when she comes closer for the touch when he would step back.  _But I’m learning,_ he thinks. “I’m here because of her.”

 

“You’re sure you have everything you need?” her mom asks when Rickon loads another suitcase into the back of Sandor’s Tahoe.

They’re standing in the driveway watching the slow back and forth amble of men, Robb the faintest, vaguest limp as he hauls two huge hockey equipment bags from the garage. Sandor and Rickon are here and there, the former with his phone to his ear as he confirms his leave of absence with Fish and Game, the latter pausing to text Bran care instructions for Shaggydog while they’re gone.

“I’m sure. Plus Gendry can’t get off work until tonight, so he and Arya can bring down anything we’ve forgotten,” Sansa says, shading her eyes from the midmorning glare. She hoped it would rain on their way out but the earlier cloud cover has scattered like seed to the four corners, and the sky is a bald, fathomless blue.               

“I know, and Robb will come down in a few days if the doctor clears him. Still, I worry. I want to send you off properly,” Cat says.

“You’ve already packed a cooler and done our laundry, mom, we’re fine,” she says with a smile. “It’s only a four hour drive, anyways, we’ll be fine. We can get stuff in Why when we stop for insurance.”

 “Here’s the Kevlar,” Robb says, wincing only slightly as he braces his legs and curls his arm, handing one of the heavy hockey bags to Sandor.

Sansa smiles when the older man practically flings it into the SUV.

“I’m still so pissed,” Arya says around the stick of a Blow Pop when she stalks out of the house to stand on the other side of their mother with her arms crossed over her chest. “I can’t believe you guys are going without us.”

“Better to take one car at a time, pumpkin, you know that,” their father says as he walks past them towards the car, shuffling the papers of a printed out set of Map Quest directions. “The bigger the party, the more conspicuous.”

“Besides,” Rickon says, rolling his neck and rubbing its nape as he walks back to the house, “there might not be room back there for your boogie board,” he says, giving her a pointed look, bumping her shoulder with his as he passes her by.

“Hey, don’t give me that look,” she says, taking the sucker out of her mouth to point it at him, and she turns on her heel to follow their youngest brother. “There could be tonsof downtime, you have no idea. We could be there for  _weeks_ ,” she says before they close the door behind them with a slam.

“Is that true, you think?” her mom says, turning with a concerned frown. “Your father was vague with words like days and less than a week, but nothing ever came close to  _weeks_.”

“No, I don’t think so,” Sansa says, folding her arms over her chest as she thinks out loud. “Dad’s going to keep his eye on Shireen’s landlady and house to monitor any activity. If there’s anything whatsoever then we’ll probably relocate Shireen to another city somewhere else until the will stuff is settled.  _That_  could take months, depending on how long she decides to contest the old one, but this detail will likely only be for a few days so we can get a feel for the climate. I guess she’s hashing all that out with Davos right now, before we get on the road.”

“You be sure and stay safe, Sansa,” Cat says with a shake of her head. “Nearly all my kids,” she murmurs.

“Of course I’ll be safe, I have my own personal soldier,” Sansa says with a teasing smile, and she rolls her eyes at her mother’s expression. “Oh, please,” she says, unfolding an arm to point at her father as he squats down to look through the last hockey bag of body armor. “Tell me you don’t have one and I’ll show you a liar.”

“Well,” Cat says, cocking her head to the side as she watches her husband, the father of her children, head of the pack. Sansa laughs when her mother trails off and closes her mouth with a prim smile.

It’s another hour and a half before they finally manage to get everything and everyone squared away. Sandor’s old Tahoe is a shift and rumble between red lights as they cross town to the interstate and finally onto the 86 where it smoothes out to a big car hum, the seams and cracks on the sun baked road giving an oddly soothing rhythm to the ride. It’s a moonscape of brown rock and scrubby plants out here, though the monsoon season has done its best to inject a little greenery here and there, and the noonday sun overhead gives no shadows for her eyes to play games with. It is glitter and scald, wincingly bright, the eternal sprawl of a headache that makes her scoot her sunglasses higher up the bridge of her nose.

They are all of them quiet for some time, though she has the comfort of Sandor’s hand when it drifts over the center console to find her own, because it is not your everyday road trip that they’re on. Sansa chews her lip as she gazes out at the miles and miles of nothing, rests the backs of her fingers against the pane of glass to gauge the heat, and she almost jumps in her seat, it’s that shocking to the touch.

“Jesus, it’s hot,” she says, looking at her knuckles as if she’ll find burns. “It’s going to be brutal down by the beach this time of year. I’m not one to pray for tropical storms, but Rocky Point in August? Hey, did Mrs. Celtigar say if this place has A/C?” she says, twisting in her seat to look back, but it’s the sight that stops her from prattling on.

“They’ve been asleep since we hit the 86,” he says, his voice a match to the Tahoe’s engine, and he gives her a smile when he glances at her from the road.

Rickon is in a long bodied lean against the side of the SUV, his hips angled towards the center of the car with one leg half up on the seat, his back wedged against the door. Shireen has her legs up, feet shoved against the opposite door, is tucked between Rickon’s body and the seat back. He’s got his arms wrapped around her shoulders, holding her against his chest where she’s out like a light, mouth parted as if mid-kiss, and her head lolls to and fro from the rhythm of the road.

“I feel so bad for them,” Sansa says, gazing at them a moment longer. “Shireen told me she was up most of the night with bad dreams and Rickon wasn’t much better.” She turns back in her seat to face the road, pulling up a playlist on her iPod before using Robb’s converter to play it on a dead air radio station. Imogen Heap croons her way into the car and Sansa sits back with a sigh as the world streaks past them, blurred lines of brown and green, the occasional black swoop of a carrion bird descending from the sky.

“I can’t imagine what happened to them making his PTSD any better,” Sandor says, sliding his hand down to her thigh as she fiddles with her music.

“And now Shireen’s got a little dose of her own,” Sansa says sadly, and they are quiet for the rest of the drive to get their Mexican car insurance in Why, hands clasped, fingers laced.

 “All right, you two, time to wake up,” Sandor says as he slows them down, his pinky pushing down the blinker as he swings the SUV left onto the 85, keeping up a moderate crawl to pull into the Texaco on the right.

Sansa slides her feet back into her sandals when he parks by a gas pump in the blessed shade of the metal canopy overhead, but despite the respite from the sun when he turns off the ignition and the A/C stops, it’s immediately still and stuffy, overwhelmingly warm so that she is forced to open the car door and step out. She leaves the door open to give the interior some air flow, stretches her arms and stands on her tiptoes. She watches Sandor walk inside as he pulls his wallet from his back pocket, and there is a certain sort of hypnotism there, in the way his shoulders move opposite to his stride. Sansa stands in the middle of nowhere and smiles.

“Are we already there?” Shireen says, and Sansa turns to look in the backseat where they are still in their tired puppy slouch together. “Ric, wake up,” she says when she sits up with a discombobulated glance around, ruffling up her bangs as she drags her fingers through her hair. “I have no idea where we are.”

“Why,” Sansa says with a smile, opening the backseat to give them some semblance of circulation, gripping the top of the car door as she leans against it. It’s an old gag but she’s never been one to shy away from silly jokes, and this is a trip that could use a few laughs. Shireen yawns, covering it with the back of her hand, and blinks confusedly at Sansa as she wriggles her feet back into her flip flops.

“Because I fell asleep ages ago, and I—”

“Don’t answer her; she’s just fucking with you. We’re  _in_  Why, about halfway to Rocky Point,” Rickon says, groaning like an old man as he sits up, bowing his head over his knees to stretch out his spine. Her little brother glances up at her from her his eyebrows, shaking his head with mock gravitas. “Way to whip out the dad jokes, San.”

“Spoilsport,” Sansa says, sticking out her tongue before turning to find cooler air and older men, to grab some cold water and maybe something colder.

“What’s all that?” Sandor asks, looking up from probably the fifth form he’s filled out today.

“Ice cream,” Sansa says, setting down a bottle of Fiji water before letting four sherbet orange push pops tumble out of her arms onto the yellowed Plexiglas covered counter, behind from which the bored cashier looks at her with passive unamusement.

“I don’t eat ice cream,” Sandor says, straightening from his lean and hunch over the counter, handing both pen and form to the cashier who takes it without speaking and fills out the rest of it..

“Sure you do.  _Everybody_ eats ice cream when it’s 106 outside, don’t they, Shir?” she says when Shireen walks in to use the bathroom.

“ _Everybody_ , _”_  she says regally, pulling her hair up onto her head in and securing it in place with a hair tie as she drifts through the cool, dark store towards the hand-painted BATHROOMS sign in the back. Sandor mutters to himself.

Sansa tucks own her hair behind her ear as she rummages for her wallet, but her hand stills inside the depths of her purse when he rests his own hand on her wrist and pushes another sheaf of hair behind her other ear. He leaves shivers in his wake, a curl of firecracker sensation behind the shell of her ear down to her throat where his fingers are the barest of brushes to her skin.

“I might not eat ice cream, but I’ll pay for it,” he says, grumble-gravel low against her ear. She looks up at him, narrows her eyes and bites her lip as she grins and shakes her head, and then he closes his eyes with a rueful grin. “That sounded pretty ‘Dirty old man’ of me, didn’t it,” he says.

“Yeah, it did,” the cashier says as he punches up the Mexican car insurance, bottled water and ice cream, the register drawer banging open with a ding.

They walk out side by side, Sansa unwrapping a push pop, the waxed paper lid already a melting mess that she licks before tossing into the trash can outside the door to clean her fingers like a cat cleans its fur. She can feel his eyes on her, knows there are few people on earth who can’t help but watch an object of affection lick their fingers, and she feels a thrill when she looks up and sees that she’s right.

“Oh, come on,” she says, pushing the ice cream up and out before handing the pop to him, and with a roll of his eyes Sandor finally acquiesces, plucks the thing from her hand with a dark look. She grins with triumph as she unwraps her own.

“ _Fine_ ,” he says, all long-suffering agony, holding it sideways as he licks it and walks between the gas pumps towards the driver’s side door. “Thanks, babe,” he says with a moment’s hesitation between the two words, glancing over his shoulder as he does so.

Sansa stands there under the gas station canopy, all of a sudden glued to her dusty tracks, and she watches him walk around and disappear behind the Tahoe. It is the first time he’s ever called her anything but Sansa in public, and it sends her thoughts tripping over themselves as they spiral with a rush back to the last time he called her something sweet. Naked in her bed and behind her, his mouth pressed to her shoulder blade, and  _Oh—_

“What’s the matter with you,” Rickon says, making her jump clean out of her reverie. He’s peering at her from where he’s pumping gas for Sandor with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

He’s James Dean meets GI Joe in jeans that are already dusty after only ten minutes of being outside, in a white t-shirt and the wind in his lengthening hair. He’s her baby brother all grown up, a man with horror behind his eyes sometimes, with a smile on his mouth more often these days.

“Nothing,  _honey_ ,” she says with teasing emphasis, sliding her gaze sidelong at her brother as she saunters up to him, and he rolls his eyes in response to her sly look. “Here, I got you something,” she says, pulling another push pop from her purse after she licks her own. “Hurry up before it melts.”

“Ooh, ice cream really  _is_  for everybody,” Shireen says when she comes back, her floor length cotton skirt a rippling flag in the breeze, the pattern lit up by the sun. “Thank you,” she says with gusto when Sansa hands her the fourth pop, hot wind dragging through the baby hairs around her face as she takes the ice cream treat, and the three of them stand in a little circle until Rickon takes a drag of his cigarette between bared-teeth bites of ice cream.

“Oh, now that’s just gross,” Sansa says, stepping back and away from him, waving a hand in front of her face. She can handle the smell of cigarettes considering both he and Jojen smoke from time to time, but the idea of eating and smoking turns her stomach. He grins, holding his ice cream in one hand and the cigarette between his teeth as he returns the gas nozzle to its cradle and screws the gas cap back on.

“Hey,” he says to Shireen, wiping his hand on the seat of his jeans before taking the cigarette out of his mouth. He steps into her, the mirror of his shades a flash as he gazes down at Shireen, at the sudden spread of a grin and the upturn of her Holly Golightly sunglasses. “Do I gross you out, honey?”

Shireen shrugs and licks her ice cream, tilting her head as she regards him, finally shakes her head as she pulls his hand up by the wrist and holds it in front of her face.

“Nope,” she says.

It looks like she’s about to kiss his palm but then she takes a drag off the cigarette from where it perches between his fingers. She tilts her face back, her cheeks sucking in as the ember glows bright even in this vivid bleached out afternoon, finally releases him as she exhales the smoke up to the sky. Rickon laughs as he bites into his push pop, puts his arm around her shoulders and kisses her hair as she giggles with him, two grubby little desert kids on the corner of hot asphalt and quail calls, standing by a gas station in the middle of Why.

“’Atta girl,” he says, and now it’s Sansa’s turn to roll her eyes.

“Okay, so you’re _both_ gross,” Sansa snaps, turning to get back into the SUV and to hide a smile that broadens when they both burst out in even louder laughter behind her.

 

They are four passports and a carload of false smiles at the border in Lukeville, where border patrol agents stand in clusters of two or three, baseball hats shielding their faces from the afternoon cook of the sun, K-9 units sticking to the shade with their panting shepherds standing at their feet. Even though it’s a summer weekend and college kids are still roaming free stateside, the relentless August heat and tacked on humidity has left the port of entry a wasteland. The long row of shops on the Mexican side of the border stands empty, its loud and proud signs offering Vanilla extract and Talavera pottery, carved wooden figurines and LIQUOR LIQUOR LIQUOR. There rows and rows of silver jewelry, all of them winking in the sunlight, and when Sandor rolls down the window he can hear the clink and chime and clatter of hundreds of wind chimes, some of them metal and some of them wooden, all of them fucking annoying to his ears.

“Passports, please,” says the tall, bull-necked agent between chews of his gum, and Sandor has to give it to him, how fleeting the glance is at the scars. Sandor hands them all over with a nod, making sure Rickon Stark’s is on top of the pile.

Sansa is scrolling through apps on her phone, and though they’ve only known each other a few months he can tell she’s trying for nonchalance, that she’s nervous now to test the waters that Robb opened up when he texted his border patrol friend. A glance in the rearview gives him a clear sight of Rickon with his arm around Shireen, forehead pressed to her temple as they talk in tumbled undertones. He rights his head and catches Sandor’s eye in the mirror, raises his eyebrows in an otherwise motionless shrug.

“Stark?” the agent says, peering at the picture with a squint before looking back at Sandor, before giving a brief appraisal of Sansa when she looks up him, her phone forgotten between her fingers and thumbs.

“Yeah, that’s me,” she says, not without her typical charm, and he smiles, an easy thing that makes Sandor narrow his eyes.

“You by chance related to Robb?” he asks, a dose of smarm injected in his voice as he rests an arm against the car door.

“He’s our brother,” Rickon says as he rolls down his window, and Sandor grins because can see his stony glare in the side view when he sticks his head out into the heat. “I don’t suppose Jon Snow is asking?”

The border patrol agent straightens at the sudden intrusion, and though he is the man in the uniform here there is authority in Rickon’s voice and stonewall in Sandor’s expression, because they’ve just dropped a name that falls heavy at the agent’s feet.

“Pull on through and over to the side there,” the agent says, waving towards the left near the wind chimes and the beaten metal animal figures standing three feet high.

“This should be interesting,” Rickon mutters, and Sandor is no therapist but he’s been going to EB long enough, has been sitting next to this guy long enough to hear the closedown in his voice, the guard coming up. Another glance in the rearview shows it; Rickon is working jaw and wary gaze out the window as Sandor pulls in between two painted lines on the asphalt.

“It’s going to be fine, though, right? Robb said they’d help us,” Shireen says.

“Yeah, but the kind of help we’re talking about means breaking some pretty intense fucking laws. At least, I think so,” Rickon adds hastily when Shireen sucks in a gasp of surprise.

“Shut up, both of you,” Sandor says, glancing from rearview to side, and he watches two agents approach them, the other a head shorter than the bull-necked one, though judging by the former man’s brisk stride and bowed head, the way he nods curtly just before they reach the Tahoe, he is the superior of the two.

“I hear you all are friends of Robb Stark,” the new man says, ducking his head to look into the vehicle. He’s open faced, solemn and no nonsense, skin weather beaten from the sun, and Sandor can see dried sweat coloring the edge of his baseball hat a salty white.

“Brother, actually,” Rickon says, sweeping the focus away from his sister in two words, two words Sandor is grateful for. The agent, who wears the insignia of a higher rank than the first man, shifts to talk more comfortably to the Stark in the backseat.

“Glad to meet you,” he says. “I’m Jon. I’ve known your brother since we were in kindergarten, and I count that guy as one of my closest friends. Hell, he’s like a _brother_ to me. Grenn, go on and take a break, you’ve been baking in the sun for two hours.”

The agent named Grenn nods once and turns, his heel a spin in the dirt as he stalks off back towards the station, and without his presence Jon immediately slacks his shoulders with a smile that comes lighter than his previous expressions.

There are introductions and handshakes, a nod to Sansa and Shireen, and a brief, intense conversation after Jon opens the car door and scoots in, rolling up the window after shutting the door. He brings with him the scent of sweat and sun-bleached clothes, the suffocating heat, and his dark hair is short when he removes his baseball hat and wipes his forehead with the back of his wrist. Sandor flips the A/C to full blast.

“So, Robb told me you guys have been going through some pretty rough shit lately,” Jon says.

Rickon sits bitch between him and Shireen, his long legs bent up like a stick figure’s as they talk. Sandor is surprised to hear how no nonsense Rickon is under such a circumstance, even after so many months together in therapy, but the youngest Stark drops his truths like bombs: Attempted murder and the search for under-the-rug asylum, the inability to legally protect themselves here in Mexico with gunfire against those who would open fire upon them, yet how this is the easiest, quickest, cheapest place for them to hide.

“We need your help and Robb said you’d come through,” Rickon sums up, blunt as a stone and just as giving.

Jon exhales through his nose with a shake of his head. Finally he sits back against the seat, exhales a sigh and nods.

“All right, I owe your brother as much,” he says, rubs the top of his head before putting his hat back on. “Clearly I can’t help you _now_ , but I have a- well, my fiancée and future father-in-law live down in Rocky Point. I can meet you at his bar in a couple of days when I’m off duty. Until then,” he says, glancing behind his shoulders and over the low mound of luggage in the back of the SUV. “Take this. It’s mine so the station won’t miss it,” and Jon lifts his ass off the seat, pulling a .45 from the waistband of his BDUs.

He hands it to Rickon, who immediately presses the magazine release, catching it in his hand and setting it on his lap. He racks it open to peer inside the chamber, turning the gun side to side before shoving the magazine back in. He racks it forward and nods, shoving the gun under the seat of the car. Words from group therapy ricochet in Sandor’s head, words like tremor, words like panic, words like trauma. He says nothing in front of the BP agent, but he watches Rickon like a hawk through the rearview, and not for the first time does Sandor wonder about this clusterfuck.

“Thanks, man,” Rickon says, dismissive of the illegal weapon that Shireen cannot help but stare at as she cranes her neck to look down at Rickon’s feet.

“There’ll be more where it came from. Give me your number,” Jon says, typing it into his phone as Rickon recites it. “There’s a bar on the beach near Las Conchas that my fiancée’s dad owns. I’ll meet you there in two days with some friends.”

“Perfect, that’s the area where we’ll be staying,” Sansa says with a twist of her waist so she can look back at the agent.

Jon nods briefly, glancing a final time through the rear window of the SUV before opening the car door and stepping back outside, and heat floods the interior like a tidal wave until he shuts the door.

“Wait a second,” Sandor says, rolling down his window once more to call after Jon, who squints under the bill of his hat as he takes two steps back towards the SUV. “What’s it called, this bar of your father-in-law’s?”

“Shit, sorry, I totally forgot. It’s right on the beach and it’s one of the more popular places down there. You can’t miss it. It’s called Mance’s.”


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/126482723288/a-world-alone-chapter-13)

Glitter and glaze, sand bleached white as bone on a brown earth, black lava rock cragging its way up to a sky so blue it suffocates. The road is straight as a needle, a pin, the trajectory of a fired bullet, and they barrel down towards the coast, passing vast stretches of nothingness on either side of the cracked asphalt road. Shireen watches it go by from the air conditioned back seat of Sandor’s Tahoe, from under the comforting weight of Rickon’s arm across her shoulders. They are both silent gazes through the left passenger side window, her head tipped towards him from where she sits in the middle of the seat. Ever since their nap they’ve forgone seatbelts, and it makes her feel lawless and reckless though she knows this is ridiculous, and because of that she doesn’t say anything. After all, Rickon handled a gun like it was a dish towel or something else completely innocuous, and not the same kind of weapon used to try and kill them a day ago. A shudder at the memory catches her off guard, and it rolls through her like thunder through a cloud.

“You okay?” Rickon asks, turning from the window to regard her, his gaze a drop and lift from her eyes to her mouth and back again, and now it’s a shiver that threatens, though she suppresses it before it sweeps her over.

“Yeah, I just, you know, I was just thinking about it,” she says, and after spending nearly the entire night talking with him between stops and starts of sleep, he knows full well what she’s referring to.

“Ah. Not okay, then,” he murmurs with a nod. Rickon lifts his elbow from the car door’s armrest, is all careful hesitance when he brushes the side of her face with his fingers, as if he hasn’t slept beside her twice now, as if he hasn’t kissed her already, as if she isn’t pliant eagerness at the thought of kissing him again. “Is there anything I can do to help?” he says, and the timing of it all makes her laugh.

“You’re doing it,” she says, because it’s true. “If you weren’t here with me, I’d be screaming right now,” she whispers.

“Well, we don’t want you screaming,” he says, and now his eyes flit here and there across her face like butterflies landing, his thumb a soft drag across her lower lip, and because it’s something she’ll never forget she opens her mouth so he has the touch of  _her_  tongue, this go round. Rickon inhales through his teeth with a smile. “I mean I’d love to make you scream, just not- oh Christ,” he says when his words settle themselves into permanence all around them. His hand drops away from her cheek as his face flushes beet red and he turns to stare out the window.

“Oh my  _God_ ,” Sansa mutters as she tosses her phone on the dashboard in sisterly disgust.

“For fuck’s sake, man,” Sandor says from behind the wheel. “If I find a cold shower on the side of the road I’ll make sure to stop,” he says.

“I’m sorry,” Rickon says when he looks back at her, and she cannot help the grin and giggle that overtake her. “I just, it just slipped out. You did the thing and I think I lost my mind for a minute there.”

“I’ll say,” Sandor says. “Turn up the music, baby, anything to drown him out,” and Sansa complies, filling the car with the low hauntings of Phantogram.

“Sorry,” Rickon mutters through the music, closing his eyes and shaking his head. “I’m a fucking idiot.”

“You and me both,” Shireen says, stretching into him to plant a kiss on his cheek.

He flexes the muscles in the arm around her shoulders, holds her firm as he turns towards her, his nose a brush against hers when he kisses her. She is pinned against him, her arms folded like a bird’s wings between their bodies until she remembers herself, realizes she has the roam of him if she so desires. Shireen frees a hand to slide it up his chest to the back of his neck so she can hold him right back, and it’s then that she feels him slacken, feels the tension flee as he opens his mouth and invites her inside _._

She feels like she’s unfolding when his tongue slow-slides against hers, feels like a wrapped package he’s undoing with his fingers in her hair, with the long drop of his hand as it runs down the side of her leg to tuck into the bend of her knee. It’s a good kiss, a deep kiss, the kind to curl the toes and stretch the spine and to fill all the pages of a diary, and she is delightfully lost. All the bad things fall away like rainwater off a roof, and she sinks into the comfort and the hot sex spark of it, the sweet spice burn in her belly and how her head seems suddenly empty except for _Kisses, kisses, kisses._

When it breaks there’s sorrow on her tongue for the loss of him, a breathless dizziness he captures with another kiss and another, and they are like tiny goodbyes, small apologies that all things have to come to an end, that they cannot live and die right here inside that kiss.

Rickon hums a sigh with his forehead against hers, his hand a northerly sweep back up her thigh to her hip and waist before it lifts off to land on her cheek with the soft cup of his palm.

“I feel like if I try to talk right now it’ll come out in another language,” she whispers through the taste of him, and Rickon breathes out a laugh.

“Well, you’re still making perfect sense to me,” he says, making her smile.

It’s only another half an hour before the stretch of nothing turns to civilization with the slow emergence of abandoned houses and the skeletons of forgotten businesses, exposed roof beams baking and cooking into dust. Empty structures turn into fleshed out small city blocks and pale green parks, as low squat bushes become tall trees that stand and wag blousy and blasé in the hot breezes.

They stop at a brightly lit supermarket to buy bottled water and things to make dinner. When Shireen gets out of the car it’s with gasping shock at the sudden intensity of heat. It is easily over 100 degrees and the humidity is struggling to match it point for point.

“It’s like being in an oven,” Sansa says, twisting her hair up to get it off of her neck.

They enter the store in pairs, Shireen and Sansa making a plan of attack in a two-woman huddle while Sandor and Rickon drift like hobos up and down the aisles looking at and picking up random objects. They pad the cooler with skirt steak, tortillas and queso blanco, a carton of eggs for the morning, limes and salsa and chips, mangos and bananas and glass bottles of Coke. They sweat in the parking lot under the Mexican sun as they rearrange everything until it fits among the sandwiches and snacks Catelyn packed for them. That’s when Rickon and Sandor step out of the store with bottles of Presidente and Patron, wearing matching grins of a mingled sort of sheepish shamelessness as everyone piles back in the Tahoe.

“There, take a left,” Rickon says when they see a huge sign with an arrow and LAS CONCHAS on it.

It’s like driving through sand dunes heading through this sandy desert, all flat and cocoa brown, but soon enough the emptiness fills up again, this time with fancy vacation rentals and planted palm trees crowding out the scrubby desert brush and moonscape of barren rock and soil. And beyond the rows and rows of houses stretches the sea of Cortez, a blue dazzle of sun on water and the foamy white surf from the low crash of waves.

“You have to be kidding me,” Sandor says when they find Mrs. Celtigar’s house, and he’s two forearms draped over the steering wheel as he leans forward. “And this woman never had kids, no big extended sort of family?”

They all stare open mouthed at what can only be described as a hacienda, a massive single story of whitewashed adobe and terra cotta roof tiles, a brightly scrubbed seashell in the sand with blue trim and colorful tile decorating the steps leading up from the sand to the porch. Shireen can see the glitter of the ocean just beyond the beachfront property; the whole thing is like a postcard.

“Well, no, it was just her and her husband until he died,” Shireen says, pausing a moment to think on it. “But I have a feeling they probably liked to party.”

Before she and Rickon left her house last night, Mrs. C told her that the property maintained by a cleaning company, so it shouldn’t surprise her when they unlock the door and walk into a bright, airy room that smells of pine sol, but it does just the same.  The floor is a sea of vivid Saltillo tile and it shines a warm earthy orange when they flick on the lights. The center of the room is a sitting area with long low couches and a box television on a credenza against the far right wall; to the left is an updated kitchen and in the back is the dining area, framed with floor to ceiling windows.

“It’s like a summer palace,” Sansa says, and she drops her purse and lifts her arms as she closes her eyes and breathes in. “Oh my God, _air conditioning,_ ” she says, so richly decadent that Shireen laughs. “Thank you, Mrs. Celtigar.”

They discover the place has four bedrooms, two to each side of the huge main room, and Shireen’s heart starts beating like the drumming of a woodpecker when Sansa and Sandor disappear into one room together with their luggage and Rickon and she are left standing facing each other.

“I uh, huh,” he says, picking up both of their bags as they drift to the opposite side of the house where two bedroom doors stand open and waiting, side by side. To Shireen it feels like the house is teasing them, or maybe Mrs. Celtigar is somehow managing it all the way from Tucson.

She fell asleep with him last night, curled up and tucked up against his side, and they have shared a handful of kisses in the last 24 hours, but they hesitate now in this white-light-bright hallway with a view of the ocean at the end of it. Rickon sets her case down between the doorways, rubs the back of his neck as he looks down at her with confliction on his face.

“You can just—”she says as he opens his mouth to speak, and she could kick herself for not plowing right through his words with her own.

“I’ll uh, I’ll just take the room on the left,” he says finally, gaze a lift and drop, lift and drop, and she feels like she’s slowly being undressed, here. He clears his throat and leans to the side, gazing around her at the other bedroom. “That one’s bigger. If having sisters taught me anything it’s that women need their space.”

Need or no, it’s the last thing she wants, space away from him, but she doesn’t quite know how to say that without it sounding hasty or sloppy. She invited him to stay with her just the night before, and yet here he is, taking steps away from her, literally and figuratively as he steps backwards into his freshly claimed bedroom.

“Oh, okay, sure,” she says, small and silly and all little girl tremble, and she smiles with false shine as she nods.

Her bedroom is king-bed large with its own bathroom and a sliding glass door leading out onto the massive back patio, has cheerfully patterned drapes pulled shut to keep out the sun and its intrusive heat. She brings in her suitcase and sets it on the bed, unzips it after she checks to see that the dresser drawers are empty. They are until she fills them with her clothing, sundresses and skirts and shorts, has a bra and pair of lace panties in her hand as she turns from suitcase to dresser, only to see Rickon standing in the doorway of her room. He’s leaning in, his forearms braced on either side of the doorframe.

“I was just checking on you,” he says with a fleeting glance to her unmentionables before Shireen literally throws them into the open drawer. He closes his eyes and shakes his head, winces through the nip he gives his lower lip. “And now I feel stupid for not knocking.”

“You don’t need to knock,” she says, bold as brass and more forward than she meant to be, and she drops her gaze to the drawer as she closes it. “Since when do hooligans knock?” she says lightly, trying to breeze past the moment to give her blush a chance to fade.

“Never, when they have a troublemaker to crawl through windows for them,” he says with a laugh. “Come on, let’s go see what the others are doing. I’ll make you a drink if you want one.”

She watches as he pushes off the doorframe and steps back into the hallway, waiting for her to follow, and the buzz in her brain and the quick of her pulse, the thrum in the deep down of her all collide and inspire her to stake a claim.

“Rickon, wait,” she says, heart in her throat when she closes the distance between them, his dog tags a chinkle between her skin and her shirt when she lifts her arms to wind them around his neck. “You forgot something.”

“Hmm?” His hands are feather light things that press fully flat to her back when he pulls her in and holds her against him, his breath a gust of mint from the gum he bought off of a little girl outside of the Super Mercado.

 “This,” she says as she tugs him down towards her.

 

He’s a branded man, sitting here beside Sandor on the low wall dividing the back patio from the beach, sprays of Christmas lights strung up along the house behind them. Rickon can still feel her on his mouth, and every time he closes his fists he thinks of the smooth slopes of her he’s touched so far. The swell of a hip and the dip of a knee, the flat of her back and the round of her cheek. And then he thinks of how badly he wants more.

“Hey there, Daydream,” Sandor says, rattling his brandy on the rocks as he gazes into the tumbler glass, and the sharper bark to his voice is what finally snaps Rickon out of it and makes him lift his head and tune in. “I’ve said the same thing twice and all you’ve said is ‘Yeah’.”

“Sorry,” he says hastily, picking up his own glass of Presidente and coke to sip it. “I was just lost in uh, in thought for a minute there.”

“I know exactly what you were lost in,” Sandor snorts, gesturing with his glass to the surf line where Sansa and Shireen are standing. “You were lost in  _her_ ,” he says with a chuckle and another shake of his ice.

He’d argue but it would be a lie, and he’s sat in group with Sandor long enough to drop the pretense and bullshit, and so Rickon simply shrugs.

The sun is in a quickening slide down the slope of the sky, will touch the horizon of water in a few minutes, and they sit in silence as they watch the waves roll in and the surf chase out, watch Shireen and his sister do the same dance with the sea. They are steps in and then darting sprints out when larger waves come down around them. Shireen’s skirt is bunched up at her thighs as she holds it up out of the water with one hand and holds her tequila and lime with the other. He smiles. It is peaceful and lulling, it is two guys watching pretty girls, it is the low hum rush and crush of waves, the occasional laughing squeal, the white sand turning the color of shadow as the sun says her goodbyes and sets the ocean on fire with light.

Rickon breathes in, and Rickon breathes out.

“So how are you  _really_  holding up? With the shooting, with having a gun again, with the legality shit,” Sandor says, rupturing the tranquility like a needle does a balloon. “With almost losing her last night,” he adds finally after clearing his throat. Rickon looks up at him sharply with a frown, sighs before knocking back the rest of his drink.

“It’s uh, hmm,” he says, trying to find the words to describe the feeling, the cut up way he feels, put together with pieces that don’t really fit anymore. “You have a toolbox, right? And there are all the little trays and cubbies, all the little drawers for the different stuff you need. I used to be real good at using one drawer at a time, never letting the shit in one tray fall into another. After what happened in Iraq it’s like someone took the toolbox and shook the hell out of it. Everything landed in a big fucking pile, some trays are empty, others are loaded down with- with-“ Rickon closes his eyes. One of the girls shrieks down by the water, and for a moment it sounds like a scream. “With everything. Just everything.”

“And now?”

“And now,” he says, opening his eyes to see his sister and Shireen heading back up the beach towards the house. “And now the toolbox is getting cleaned out and organized again, and there’s- there’s a new compartment in it,” he says, watching as she lets her long skirt drop to hide the soft of thigh and the curve of calf, watches her throat stretch as she drains her drink.

“And?” Sandor says, body turned halfway towards him as he listens.

“And it means that the other compartments have to stay clutter free. It means that it makes it easier, I think. I don’t fucking know metaphors, man. It means that- I have a job to do, and it’s to keep her safe, and there’s no way I’m going to fuck that up. So the trays and cubbies have to do their jobs again. I can’t be a mess anymore.”

“Hey, you two,” Sansa says as the two of them head up the steps towards them, off of the dusk-blackened beach onto the lit up patio.

“Hey, woman,” Sandor says, his face an upward tilt when she leans in to kiss him.

“You need another drink? We’re getting refills,” Shireen says, and Rickon smiles when she glances at his empty glass and reaches for it.

“Thanks, Trouble,” he says, watching the roll of her gait as she follows his taller sister into the house.  _You forgot something,_  he recalls, and oh, he’ll never forget again.

“So you’re just fine, then, huh?” Sandor says, and it’s all serious grey that looks black in this early evening hour when he pins Rickon with an unwavering look.

“I’m not  _fine_ , but I’m not losing my mind or anything. I- you know, when I’m around her, it’s like the big bad world just sort of checks itself at the door. I don’t know, maybe that’s stupid. Maybe I’m one fireworks show away from going ape shit, I don’t know. But I feel _clearer_ than I did before, even with- with Wylla, or my family. And I uh, I gave her my tags,” he says after a moment’s pause, feeling even dumber now for admitting it, even though he has bared his soul in front of Sandor before, sitting in a plastic chair with macaroni art on the walls.

“I know, I saw,” Sandor says. “I dropped mine in my father’s casket. Didn’t want to carry it around with me anymore, so I buried it.” It is something he never knew before, and Rickon squints in the fairy light glow as he looks at his friend. Sandor chuckles. “Yeah, not as romantic as giving them to a girl, is it.”

“I didn’t do it as some romantic gesture,” Rickon says, only mildly defensive as he listens to rather than watches the waves crash to shore. “I did it because, uh. I did it because she’s so careful, and she’s _good_ , and I figured if I gave her that part she’d take care of it better than I ever would. And then, oh man, when I saw her wearing them last night,” Rickon says, shaking his head and wiping the sweat from his forehead with his hand. “That was intense. Like I knew she’d hold onto them, but I had no idea she’d actually _wear_ them.” He smiles at the black sea in front of him.

“Does she know what that part of you represents? Have you told her what happened? She should know, Ric, and you should tell her, if you’re going around handing out your tags.”

“She knows some stuff but no, I haven’t. Why, have you _?_  Told Sansa I mean. About the sniping? About Gregor leaving you to the enemy? _All_ of it?”

“All of it,” Sandor says, and they both of them turn around when the back door slides open.

“All of what?” Sansa says as she and Shireen walk through with refreshed drinks, two sways of long hair, one a river of red, the other a fountain of ink. It’s the black he’s interested in, the black he watches as Shireen walks his way.

“Nothing,” Rickon and Sandor say in unison.

He dreams of seawater rush and saltwater foam, waves crashing down around him as the enemy emerge like merfolk from the ocean. They are dead, all of them, and there are slicks of gasoline on the surface of the water, and he is shooting them, the assault rifle a heavy comfort in his hands as he fires, fires, fires. They drop and they laugh as they get back to their waterlogged feet, and bony fingers bore into his flesh when one of them grabs his arm. It is cold and wet, the touch of death and rot and fear.

“Shaggy,” he says. “Shaggydog, Shaggydog,” he screams.

“It’s okay, Rickon. It’s okay, honey,” Osha says next to him, and when she lights a cigarette he can see the smoke draw into her mouth through the gaping wound in her cheek.

“No, don’t,” he says when she flicks the match into the water. “Oh God, no,” he says when she sets the world on fire, because the parts of him that used to want to join his friends don’t exist anymore, and he doesn’t want to leave this world behind, not now, _Please not now._

“Rickon, wake up, it’s okay, just wake up,” a woman says, and when something cold and wet rests on his forehead he sits bolt upright with an animal shout of terror.

“Shaggydog,” he pants, looking around sightlessly, but it isn’t his room or even the couch in the living room, and he’s  _lost,_  unable to anchor himself, and that makes him think of the sea of the dead. “ _Shaggy!_ ” he shouts.

“Rickon, look at me,” a woman says, and he  _knows_  this woman, he knows the touch and the taste and the feel of her, and it comes back to him in a rush when she takes his hand and places it palm down on her cheek.

“Shireen,” he says.

“Yes. It’s me, I’m here, Ric, I’m here,” she says, over and over again.

She’s sitting on the edge of his bed, wide eyed and backlit from the low light shining in from the hall, half bathed in the little halo of orange-cream light from the tiny lamp on the nightstand. Osha rises up in his memory, the flap of skin hanging from her jawbone, and he closes his eyes, grits his teeth and hisses, tries to wrench his hand from her face where he’s scared there’s a gash, some great gaping thing, but Shireen squeezes his hand and pins him to her.

“Open your eyes, Rickon. Talk to me, describe um, describe the bed,” she says.

“It’s a bed,” he grits out “It’s a fucking bed, it’s just a  _fucking_  bed,” he says, shaking his head violently from side to side because there’s that cold and wet thing on his forehead and he  _hates_  it.

“Okay, fine,” she says, and the cold wet dead thing is gone. “Okay, then describe me,” she says, both hands cradling his as she holds it to her face. “Describe  _me_ , Rickon, and open your eyes now.  _Now,_ ” she demands.

“You’re Shireen,” he says. “You’re a woman, you’re- you’re uh, you have black hair. Black hair and blue eyes and you’re sad. So _sad_. You uh, oh fuck,” he says, but when he tries to close his eyes again she rests a hand on his knee, the sheets a sweat-soaked twist in his lap, and she gives him a rousing shake that makes him open his eyes. “You kiss me and it’s like breathing for the first time. You’re uh, you’re smart and you make me laugh and you um, your skin is soft,” he says, swallowing the panic as he stares at her between rapid fire blinks. “You’re beautiful and I’m – you’re Shireen and I- you’re Shireen and you’re here right now and _fuck,_ I don’t know.”

“I meant the scars, Ric, what about those,” she says, and he frowns because he doesn’t understand what she’s talking about, but when her hands loosen their press on top of his he is able to move his fingers.

He lifts his hand to a hover, remembering now that they smooth out with pressure, that the way to feel them is with light touch like breezes through a long cotton skirt. Rickon swallows again as he tries to master himself, feels his heart pound like he’s running down a deserted highway. She closes her eyes when he sends his touch over the high rise of her cheekbone, down the plane of her cheek towards her jaw. His fingertips ignite with the sensation of minute detail, of knobs and bumps and craters, of longer streaks of raised skin like scuffs on patent leather.

“They’re soft,” he murmurs, “soft like the rest of you, but they’re different, like- they’re like tiger stripes, I think. I don’t know,” he says, letting his fingers fall to her throat as he bends his wrist to bring his thumb up and across. “They’re pretty, and they’re- huh, they’re wet,” he says, frowning when that feeling registers, and he looks up from her cheek to her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she says, blinking away tears that fall on his thumb.

“You’re _crying_ ,” he says, the dull ebb of terror abating as he tackles this mystery, tries to figure out what’s hurting her, and he worries that he’s done something, that maybe he struck her while mired in his nightmare. “Shir, why are you crying?”

“Because you called me beautiful,” she says, her voice rending over that ribbon of a word. “Because you said my scars are pretty and nobody, _nobody’s_ ever called them that.”

 

“Thank you,” he says an hour later, stepping out of her bathroom with steam and the scent of soap on his heels. He’s in a pair of pajama pants and nothing else, is rubbing his head with a towel as he stands between the bathroom and the door to her bedroom.

She mastered herself hastily after his sweet words made her cry, though there was nothing to stop her from going over his words in her head while he showered off his nightmare and his panic attack. _He called me beautiful. He thinks my scars are pretty,_ she thought, fingers running over them in the light way his did. She shook her head over and over again, mystified by his pronouncement, bewildered that someone with such a fortunate reflection in the mirror could look at her and say those kinds of words.

“No problem, honey,” she says with a smile, hands folded in her lap as she sits tailor style on her bed, the sheets still kicked back from when his outburst woke her out of a dead sleep. “You feeling better?”

“Yeah, they tend to do the trick, more often than not, even though I, uh,” he says, lowering the towel from his hair, hefting it in his hands before swinging it in a loop over his head to drape over his shoulders behind his neck. Rickon bows his head like his mouth is too heavy with words, too full of things he doesn’t want to say.

“What, what’s wrong?” she asks with a frown, and she has half a mind to leap to her feet and rush to his side.

She’d do anything to make sure he stays comfortable; the terror on his face when he was locked up in his dreams was horrifying, and his violent reaction to her cold compress made her feel awful. She felt her heart break in that moment as she tried and failed to call him back from whatever horrors had him trapped, and the idea of him suffering all over again chills her blood. Rickon hesitates a moment, hands gripping the ends of the towel as he debates with himself; she can practically see the argument chase itself across his expression.

“I don’t want to go back to that bed, is all,” he finally says with a sigh, turning back to the bathroom to hang the towel on its bar. “I wish Shaggydog was here,” and Shireen nods sadly, remembering the desperation in his voice when he screamed for his beloved dog.

“I know Shaggy isn’t here, but I am,” she says when he walks back in, and her words make him freeze, make him widen his eyes, and that makes her smile. “You know I’ve already asked you once to stay with me, before. Tonight’s no different.”

“Yeah, but I- after what had happened, I figured it was just because of- I didn’t think we were just going to start sleeping together every night after that. Not sleeping together like _sleeping_ together, though I would love to- Wait a minute,” he says with a shake of his head as words and meaning bulldoze and abandon him.

She can’t help but laugh, head dipped and eyes downcast, even with that sluice of pin-prickle tingle such an accidental confession can give.

“Oh shut up,” he says, rubbing his face with his hands.

“Honestly _you’re_ probably the one who needs to shut up right about now,” she says, and he laughs with a single _Ha_.  

“You’re pretty mean to someone who’s so fuckin’ defenseless right now,” he says, but it’s tangled up with as much amusement as exasperation, is as sweet as the growl of an exhausted puppy.

“Look, if you don’t want to go back there then I sure as hell don’t want you to, either,” she says after a fortifying sigh, running her hands up and through her bangs, drawing her hair away from her face as she braves a look up at him.

“Yeah?” He’s coy for a man with all that muscle, is all look and look away, is visible relief when she nods.

“Yeah,” she says, scooting back to the headboard when he smiles and walks to the bed. “And maybe, if you’re okay with it, we’ll just assume I mean tomorrow night, too.”

“I’m okay with it,” he smiles when he sits on the bed and swings his legs up, and she has the distinct pleasure of finding herself in his arms again when he slides down and turns towards her, pulling her into him.

“Will you be able to sleep, you think?” she asks, and he tells her maybe, maybe not, that he already got a couple of hours in and that could make it difficult, but that at least he’s in a new environment, a clean slate here with her in her bed. He thanks her for the invitation, paints her mouth with gratitude when he kisses her.

They face each other, lying on their sides with their heads on the same pillow. She’s got the drift of his fingers over her scars again as he studies them in the light casting itself in from the bathroom.

“You said once that you were the one who did this,” he says after the brushstroke repetition of his touch has her eyes drowsing shut, but they open when he speaks. “In the truck outside of Mel’s that one night, you said _you_ messed your face up,” he says.

There is a question that sits unspoken here on the pillow between their mouths, because one thing they do not do to one another is pry. But he’s depleted from his ordeal and there’s trouble soaking his expression as he looks at her for distraction, and she knows him well enough now to know she’s safe with him. And there is the fact that he has saved her life; the least she can do is give it back to him and let him see what it is he was so quick to guard.

“I did,” she says finally, filling her lungs with a breath before sighing it out.

“Tell me,” he says. “If you want. Just tell me _something_ about you. Fill my head with you instead of all the other shit that’s up there.”

“It’s not- it’s a pretty depressing story,” she murmurs. “What if it gives you bad dreams?”

“It’s you,” he says. “It won’t.”

“Stubborn,” she murmurs, and he smiles with his eyes closed when she lifts a hand to run her fingers through his hair.

“Stalling,” he says, raising his eyebrows over closed lids.

“All right, all right,” she says, shyness taking her over as she tells him about the horrible acne she had as a young girl of 14. Her eyes drift away from his, and she toys with his dog tags where they’ve slipped from inside her tank top to the mattress between them. It is the all too common tale that so many others tell; that crippling insecurity and acute pain of leaving the house, how her mother’s refusal to let her wear makeup only made it worse.

“It was _all_ over my face. Just, I mean it was _horrible,_ Rickon. I want you to think of that one kid everybody knew in school, the one absolutely covered with it. That was me. It was just, it was agony. Absolute agony.”

“If it was all over then why did it only scar here?” he says, lifting his head to inspect them again, as if he does not already know them well by now.

“They- those aren’t acne scars, Rickon. I um, oh God,” she says, making a fist around his tags. “Do you know what a pumice stone is?”

She nods when he tells her he does, and she closes her eyes when she tells him how she took her mother’s stone to her face, scraping and scraping until she bled, over and over again trying to rub the acne off her skin.

“I was desperate,” she whispers. “So above and beyond desperate to not get picked on anymore, to just be treated like one of the other girls.”

Remembering and retelling does not make her cry, not like words like _Beautiful_ and _Pretty_ do, because this is something she’s used to soaking in, unlike those kindnesses. But it does make her stop and start a few times when she describes her mother’s hysterical breakdown after finding her with half a face scraped and raw, blood running down the backs of her fingers and down her neck.

“Come here,” he says when her throat sticks from the words, and she’s pulled onto his bare chest when he rolls on his back. “You don’t have to tell me anymore, baby, it’s okay. Forget about it.”

“No, it’s fine, honestly. I um, I want you to know. I do,” she says, and his hand in her hair is a smooth soothe, the beat of his heart under her ear is a steady rhythm she breathes in time to.

“So, afterwards they put me in a mandatory three day psych hold because they thought I was suicidal. No one listened to the truth. See, _you_ think I’m so smart, but nobody thought I would be so stupid to try and saw off a bunch of pimply skin, so they assumed it was a bizarre attempt on my life. It wasn’t long after that when my mom left us, and I honestly can’t help but think, you know. She left because of me.”

“Nobody could leave you, Shireen,” he murmurs. He kisses her forehead and sighs, runs his fingers from her shoulder to wrist and back up again, and the combination of the A/C and the feather light touch leaves a sweep of gooseflesh in its wake.

“The worst was that if I had just left it well enough alone, I wouldn’t have had any lasting scars,” she says, and here is where the bitter laugh can’t be kept in. “I got on the pill when I turned 16 and within six months, poof. Everything gone except what I had done to myself,” she says, drawing the dog tags up and away from her body to look at them where they rest on his chest. “I could be normal, if I hadn’t ruined my- if I had just—”

“Hey,” he says roughly, and Shireen rolls onto her belly to better see him, half on his chest and half on the bed between his body and the arm he has around her. He touches her cheek. “I want you to know something right now. This right here, this isn’t ruined, okay? This is _perfect. You’re_ perfect, just how you are. I wouldn’t want- not that I have any right, but I wouldn’t have you any other way.”

Rickon is fierce and firm, a bare chest fuzzed and warm, a damp head of hair that smells like her shampoo, a man all torn up on the inside with his own ordeals and his own traumas. And yet here he is with a heart full of worry for her.

“You’re going to make me cry again,” she says, smiling through the waver of her voice.

“What, with the truth?”

“With sweetness,” she smiles.

 _With love,_ she thinks later when he’s turned off the bathroom light and come back to her, because that’s what’s starting to bloom here for her, in the way he breathes in as he kisses her hair, in the way he can’t seem to stop touching her with a hand on the skin of her lower back. In the earnest way he shapes his words like little presents before giving them to her, in the way he hums with pleasure when she kisses his chest in the dark.

“If I fall asleep, will you try and sleep too?” she asks when the conversation peters out into deep, even breathing, into the beat of his heart and the feel of his skin under her palm.

“I’m trying now, Chatty Cathy,” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice, can hear the deep, big-cat rumble of it through his body. “It’s all right though, even if I don’t. I’m used to it.”

“It just seems sort of lonely, if I’m asleep and you’re not there with me,” she says, because it’s easy to admit these things in the dark.

“Well,” he says after a long pause, “when you put it _that_ way,” and it’s the last thing she remembers before she drifts off on a sea of Rickon, in a little boat of arms and a voice, swept away in the current of his pulse beneath her ear.

 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/127107261083/a-world-alone-chapter-14)
> 
> [MANCE!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/127127331468/bex-morealli-jillypups-bex-morealli-a)

He wakes up slow-drip slow, the newness of his surroundings enough to finally stir him though he feels like he’s been through the wringer inside out and all twisted up, though he thinks he could likely sleep the day away. The main thing Rickon registers is that he’s waking up to begin with, that he managed to drift off to sleep after Shireen’s breath went slack and deep. With that dawning realization come the others, the tingling in his left arm beneath the pillow, the warm air between the curve of her back and his chest as he lies on his side. His arm rests in the dip of a waist, his hand someplace soft and supple and warm, and when he tucks up his legs he feels them slide into the bend of her knees.

 _Shireen,_  he thinks, and it’s the sound of her voice that pushes back nightmares, the sweet smooth of her that lulls him down, the pull of her that wakes him back up.  _This is what it’s like to be eaten up whole._

Rickon smiles with his eyes closed as he moves to pull her closer, his open hand full of her, the squeeze and knead of fingertips finding delightful give, making her move against him, making her suck in a breath.  _Let’s turn it into a moan,_  some faraway part of him decides, that deep dark animal that makes him want to move his hips, and he buries his nose against her neck once he’s got her flush against his chest.  It is then that implication becomes reality. As he rouses and rises to the occasion he becomes aware of himself and the fact that sometime in the night he pushed his hand up under her shirt. He is cupping her breast as a lover would, has invited himself in without so much as a second dreamless thought.

“Shit, I’m sorry,” he whispers, his fingers stretching straight, up and away from the warmth of her, his hand a sorry slide out from underneath her shirt back where it belongs.

“No, please,” she sighs, pressing his hand to her belly where she pins it mid-flee, her back arching as she turns her face towards the ceiling, as she pushes into him where it’s suddenly a flair of agonizing, delicious pressure. She sounds like sleep tied up in a smile.

“No?” he says, using his nose to brush her hair away so he can kiss her neck, liking the way she moves his hand back to where it spent the night. Another full-palmed squeeze, another sigh, another push back against him.

“All the bad stuff, all the bad dreams and bad memories are gone now. Don’t make the good stuff leave too,” she says, her hand abandoning his now that she knows it’s back for good, and she reaches back behind her to slide fingers into his hair, and now he’s stuck.

“Am I the good stuff?” he says, eyes opening so he can see where her mouth is, open and breathing heavy to the sky. He watches her smile, her lashes still black fans against her cheeks as she keeps her eyes closed.

“Well, I don’t know that yet, do I,” she murmurs, and he huffs out an incredulous laugh.

“No, ma’am,” he says, moving his arm beneath her pillow, all pinprick tingle, bending it to bring his hand to her face. “Not yet.”

With four fingertips to her scars he beckons her to turn to him, lifts his head off the pillow to kiss her as he lets his right hand roam from breast to breast, belly to throat where he lightly grasps her.  She runs her nails against his scalp before moving her hand to his hip to slide it down and grab him by the hamstring. Shireen tugs his leg up against hers all while pushing her hips back, push back, push back, until he is as hard as a rock, taut as sinew, about to come just from this snare of hers he has wandered into so willingly.

They are two twists against each other until he slides his arm from under her and props himself on an elbow, until she turns onto her back and opens her eyes. He’s always been a relatively simple man, equal parts turned on by the sight of a naked woman as he is the feel of one, but when she looks up at him it is something he can feel in his gut, a low punch that seems to beg him, beg him, beg him. Rickon tugs up her tank top and with her help takes it off completely, and the hunger of his mouth refuses to let his eyes feast on her for long when he lowers to kiss her breasts.

 _There it is,_  he thinks, wolfish and proud when she moans, her fingers smooth across the nape of his neck, and she hisses with each flick of his tongue, each suck and pull, each wandering kiss he plants. She gives him things, little  _Ohs_  and the outstretch of her arm as she runs a hand as far down his back as she can reach, kisses to his temple and his hair when he nips her throat, opens her mouth for him when he’d like the taste of her tongue. He redirects his course in a southerly direction to get to know her better, and her ribs expand with a breath when he runs a hand down the plane of her belly. He’d have more of her if he could, and so he lifts his head to look at her, his hand curled into the waistband of her pajama pants like a question mark. Shireen tilts her head to the side as she gazes down at him, does that bitten lip coy that she does so well when she smiles and nods.

He hums, closes his fist and pulls her shorts down, scoots his body down the mattress as he follows them in pursuit, smiles when she lifts her hips for him.  _Good stuff, huh,_ he thinks with his palm between her legs, making her buck, making him grit his teeth from the heat of her.  _Good stuff doesn’t cut it._

“Rickon, what are you- I mean, um,” she says, a long slow  _um_  that sounds like a purr in the back of a cat’s throat. “I mean,” she says, nervous and breathless, and whatever it is she means dies on the inhale of a gasp when he kisses warm silk.

Rickon rises to his knees, sits back on his heels as he regards her. Her arms are flung back on the pillow, hands curled where they lay above her head, and there is a pool of chain and tags on the mattress by her underarm where they fell. Shireen draws her knees up, her painted toes pointed together as his slow study of her draws on and on, as he gluts on all the perfect, maps out the curve and flat, the dip and rise, the peak and valley.

“What are you doing,” she murmurs when he finally moves, two hands tucked behind her knees as he pulls her towards him in a series of light tugs, and she comes to him like unspooling ribbon, legs parting when her knees bump his chest. “What are you going to do, Ric,” she says when he lowers down onto his belly, his legs sliding off the bed until he kneels on the tile floor.

“What any good soldier does before a mission,” he says, thumbs sliding up under the elastic of her panties.

“What- um, what’s that,” she breathes, and he grins as he watches her pant, her pale breasts a rise and fall as her head tips back when he frees her from the last bit of her clothing. He drops them to the floor by his knees before he lowers his head, pulling her thighs over his shoulders so he has the soft round dig of her heels against his back.

“Recon,” he says with a lick.

“Oh my God,” she says, and this is what he wants his brain full of, the slippery sweet and the writhe of her, the sheer blind white of pain when she clenches tight fists in his hair so hard it makes him grunt. “Oh, I’m sorry,” she says, fingers slackening their grip.

Rickon exhales a laugh and shakes his head, lowers his head to  _get_  at her so maybe they’ll both stop saying sorry when they don’t really mean it, anymore.

It’s been a long time for him, since he’s felt loose enough and open enough to dive into someone with full conviction, and it takes him longer than he’d like to find his rhythm. He hears whimpered hesitation in her breathing long before it starts to pitch and darken, but when he takes his time he finds her somewhere between quick and slow, shallow and deep, somewhere that is only her and no one else. Rickon wraps his arms around her thighs, fingers digging in, because he’s doing something right now, because this is  _all_  that exists right now. Not the fatigue in his tongue or the dull flat pain of the tile under his knees, not the panic attack from last night, not the incident from so many months ago. The past is gone. He is a busy man, and when he finally coaxes her to come with a  _No, no, no, oh yes, yes, oh God_ he is a happy man, as well.

 

 _I am jam on toast,_  she thinks as the orgasm spreads out through her,because she’s never just lounged around completely naked when a man is still clothed before, has never just laid spread out on a bed without sheets to burrow beneath.  _But when you are made of marmalade, you do not care._  He pulls himself back up onto the bed, a hands-and-knees crawl up her body as he drops kisses here, a hipbone and the peak of a nipple, there, a high ridge of collarbone and along her jawline. Shireen lets him go wherever he wants now that there’s frosting in her veins, syrup thick and slow to pump. She cradles the back of his head when he sucks kisses onto her earlobe, his flannel pajama pants soft when he lowers down on top of her. He nestles himself in between her thighs, hums when she lifts and bends her knees until they press into his flanks.

“I know that took a while,” he murmurs, propped up on his elbows as his fingers toy with her hair.

 “Whatever you do, don’t you dare apologize, because it was  _wonderful,_ ” she sighs out. She feels like rose petals in steam, feels like a handful of powdered sugar flung into bathwater, feels the rumble of his laugh from their press of chests and the gust of it against her neck.

“I wasn’t gonna apologize,” he says. “I was just going to say that won’t be the case next time, now that I know you,” he says, giving her the salt of his success with an open mouthed kiss, fat and ripe like a berry here on her tongue.

“You won’t forget me then?” she says, all licks and kisses and smiles, all lazy uncoil of that firm knot down deep in her belly.

“I could  _never_ ,” he says, and he’s about to kiss her before he draws back again. It’s a look of hopeful, boyish pride he gives her, tentative and doubtful without confirmation. “Was it really wonderful?”

Shireen laughs, nods, is kissed again with his smile to give it shape.

He pushes up into a plank, up and away from the pin of her knees, his body a tilt and half twist as he moves to stretch out beside her, but she lifts her hands and holds him in place above her with two hands on his hips. Shireen kisses him again, gives his pajama pants a tug when his body goes tense, because unless her math is wrong, and it rarely is, there are _two_ people needing to come undone in this bed.

“We don’t- I wanted to do that just cause, for its own good, not- well, I mean, for  _your_  own good, but not because I think we have to fuck right now,” he says, once more all Rickon ramble, and she hums an  _Ah-ah-ah_ in her throat to shut him up.

“I know you did,” she says and she keeps on keeping on, pushing down his pajamas until she can’t reach them, uses her toes to drag them down the rest of the way.

 “I want to take my time,” he says helplessly, and she can hear the stumble in his voice when he’s naked and above her, when she coaxes him to straddle her and ease up the length of her body. “I don’t- I’m not going anywhere,” he says, and it’s feeble now, even as he looks down at her with hunger, anticipation, full blooded want in his expression, torn between two masters, the one in his skull and the other here in her hand.

“I know you aren’t, baby” she whispers, watching with slick, smug pleasure as his eyes roll back in his head when she wraps her other hand around the very base of him. “Neither am I,” and she sinks down on her pillow, watches his expression when she guides him into her mouth.

There is a moment of suspension when he’s as far in as he will go, when they neither of them move as they both settle into this new sweet spot they’ve wandered into. But when she moves her hands to knead his ass, when she swallows to press her tongue against him, he shudders so hard she moans. Rickon rests his head against the wall as he grabs the headboard with both hands,  and though it’s slow to build, his need to move, a few more pulls on him is all it takes to get his hips to rock back.

“Fuck,” he gasps, forehead and nose against the wall, eyes closed as his breathing becomes more and more strained, as the slide of his motion becomes a rhythm she can work with.

She intensifies her attentions so the pulls and the sucks become harder for him to escape, and he groans now with each withdraw of his hips, his shoulders rounding as his back bows, and soon it’s _Fuck_ with every other exhale. He lets go of the headboard to brace his forearms against the wall on either side of his head, and he looks down at her with such pleading, such broken boy yearning that she opens her mouth to gasp out another moan.

“Shireen, stop, I’m- oh Christ, stop,” he grits, shaking his head as he clings to the final, tension-snapping threads of self-control.

His hips jerk back away from her as if to pull completely out of her mouth, but she holds firm, one hand on the back of his thigh and the other a drift up and scratch down the wall of his abs. He is this close to ruin and she’ll be damned if she’s going to let him cut himself just short of it. So when he comes for her she’s ready for him, their gazes a final lock before she closes her eyes and drinks him in, whatever he’s got, whatever he’ll give.

Sweat dries and limbs turn to butter and back again, and for the next half an hour or so, the naked tangle of them becomes something on that luscious cusp of familiarity, still streaked through with thrill. His hand is a nonstop stroke as his gaze follows wherever it roams. Between her breasts to skirt around the well of her navel, to draw her hair away from the side of her neck, and once to hook around the back of her thigh, to pull her leg stalk straight with her toes pointed to the ceiling, until the stretch of her tendons makes her whimper, makes him smile his sorry as he kisses her hip.

She pays similar rapt attention to the shapes of him, traces scars on his shins as she sits up beside him, runs the flat of her palm up the muscle of his thigh, fingers a fleeting brush against his thicket of dark hair before she spans her fingers across his low belly. His chest rises with the inhale and he lifts his hand, hooks a finger in the chain around her neck. Shireen is snared.

“Come here,” he says with a tug on the chain.

“ _You_ come here,” she says as he runs his finger inside the taut loop of chain, a to and fro graze against her breasts, the jingle of the tags underneath.

“Okay,” he says, and she squeals when he suddenly hauls himself up into a sit, dropping the chain to wrap his arms around her and drag her back to the mattress.

They do not know what time it is but the splay of sun from behind the drapes suggests its late in the morning and hotter than sin. Here with the cool air and the overhead lights off, however, here where sheets are pushed back and the thin comforter is abandoned to the tile floor, it is all comfort, all peaceful hideaway they neither of them are in a hurry to abandon. Eventually Rickon pulls his flannel pants back on and sits on the edge of the bed as he watches her drop a dress over her head, the hem falling to the floor before she steps into a pair of underwear.

“Do you mind,” she says with a glance his way, her hair a curtain that half hides her face when she shimmies into her panties.

“I’m your security detail, Trouble, I’m not supposed to take my eyes off you,” he says, sitting forward to take a swipe at her dress when it’s bunched around her hips.

“Nothing’s going to happen to me here,” she says, darting back and swatting his hands away with a laugh.

“There are a _thousand_ things that could happen to you right where you’re standing,” he says. “If I had my way,” he murmurs, and the look he gives her kind of sort of sets her on fire all over again.

“You can have your way around me any old time you want, Rickon,” she says, and her eyes widen with scandalized delight when he immediately stands to his full height and backs her into the wall, thumbs on her hipbones, because he’s a man of his word and he does not forget the map of her, even when it’s shrouded in an oversized sundress.

“I thought you were going to take your time,” she says when he presses and rocks his hips against her, and her head hits the wall with a thud, her breath leaves her body without a sound.

“I could take my time at that too, if you wanted,” he says.

It’s so _bold_ compared to the Rickon she’s gotten to know, such a switch from the silent and sullen, the stop and stammer, the Freudian slip he insists on showing every now and then. But then she’s been ironed out smooth from the heavy weight of a good strong orgasm, and maybe it works that way for him, too. _One good meal can strengthen anyone’s nerve,_ she thinks, and she wonders what it would be like, to be completely, utterly devoured by him.

“Yes,” she says, or maybe she begs, but they both jump like nervous cats when there is a sudden pound on the door a few feet away from where he pins her.

“Look alive, you two, Gendry and Arya just pulled up,” Sandor says, giving the door another rap of his knuckles for good measure. “And clothing is _not_ optional.”

It is strange and surreal to leave this room under circumstances that are so wildly different from when they first walked in here together, despite the kisses and cuddles and naps that took place along the way. Now, when Rickon slides a finger down her spine as they walk down the hall, there are promises there that she knows are worth their weight, and she knows the taste of his victory. _And it’s me, now. I am his triumph. I am the prize,_ she thinks, and it makes her feel wonderful all over again.

They’re standing with Sandor and Sansa in the oversized front room when Arya and Gendry burst through the front door, chased inside by muggy sea air and the brilliance of noonday sunshine.

“There she is,” Gendry says, dropping his luggage to wrap her up in a bear hug that lifts her off her feet. “You okay?” he murmurs when they draw apart to look at one another.

“I’m- oh,” she sighs, putting the morning’s pliant push and pull on the shelf for a moment. “I don’t know. I’m as good as I can be? It’s so hard to wrap my head around what happened.”

“I’m so sorry I wasn’t here earlier,” he says with a frown. “I don’t know if I would have been any sort of help, but at least I’d have _been_ there,” he says, but Shireen shakes her head, pats her cousin on the broad shoulder.

“No way, Gen, if you had been there, no offense, but there’s a chance neither one of us would have survived it. I’m only- the only reason we’re standing here talking about it is because of him,” she says, because there is no reason to use names, not for _him,_ because he's the only one. The thought puts a stutter in her pulse.

“So I take it he’s been looking out for you?” he says, nodding towards Rickon who’s hugging the younger of his two sisters while trying to dodge the sucker in her hand lest it get stuck in his hair.

Her gaze follows her cousin’s, lands lightly enough as she watches Rickon take his sister’s suitcase from her, a flex of forearm as he hefts it before walking it to the bedroom next to Sandor and Sansa’s. Shireen is perfectly content to watch him walk away, shirtless as he is, but he gives her a lingering look over his shoulder, warm and searching, a question in the not-blue-not-green of his eyes. _I’m okay,_ she mouths to him. He nods, mirrors the smile she gives him with one of his own before disappearing down the hallway.

“Yeah,” she murmurs, staring at the empty space he left in his wake before looking up at her cousin. “Yeah, he’s been looking out for me,” she says, and it’s impossible to keep the dreaminess from her voice. The slow roast crackle of heat seeps out of her, that saltwater taffy morning comes down off the shelf now, and she holds it all in her heart free and clear.

“I bet he has,” Gendry says with a grin, folding his arms across his chest. “Keep the bedroom eyes in the bedroom, honey, or you’re going to set those pajamas of his on fire.”

It’s a flurry of questions when they all sit around the dining room table once Arya and Gendry have used the bathroom and gotten some water, questions like if Mrs. Celtigar is okay and if anyone followed them, if they saw Jon Snow at the border or if they’re hungry after the journey.

“Yes she’s fine, nobody followed us, Jon wasn’t there but some dude named Pyp was, and we are fucking starving,” Arya says, ticking them off on her fingers. “The food in Why looked gross, so we just decided to wait. I figure we could head over to Mance’s. They’ve got fresh seafood there, you know. I googled it on the way down.”

“We’re supposed to meet Jon there tomorrow,” Sansa points out. “Plus we bought food at the Super Mercado when you first drive into town, we don’t _have_ to go out. We’re here on business, Arya, not pleasure.”

“Fine,” she shrugs, drinks the rest of her water and sets the empty plastic tumbler down before sliding it towards the center of the table. “So dress it up in a different word. Let’s go to Mance’s and check it out before we meet these people. We’ll have a couple of drinks, eat some tacos and just, you know, have a look around before we have a meeting about getting some illegal guns.” She sits back in her chair, arms folded across her chest, and gives them all a look of just-try-me challenge.

“Why, do you think we shouldn’t trust these guys?” Shireen says, frowning into her water glass, because there is a gun called a .45 hidden under the mattress in Rickon’s unused bedroom and that makes her anxious enough; any doubt in this friend of Robb’s makes her fingers want to shake. Shireen takes a sip of her water to swallow her nerves.

“No, not at all. I’ve known Jon since I was like nine years old. I just think it’s smart to scope out a place, see the clientele, that sort of thing. You know, like recon,” Arya says with another shrug.

Before she can help herself, Shireen sputters a mouthful of water back into her glass, while Rickon just throws his head back and laughs.

 

It doesn’t take much more convincing from his sister before they’re all crammed into the Tahoe once Sandor pulls up the third row of seating, and the dishwater blonde dirt road is a soft track beneath their tires as they haul ass out of Las Conchas towards town. Despite the heat outside Sandor makes the decision to roll down all of the windows, and there’s freedom in the hot gusts of nonstop wind, in the smell of sea and desert that washes through the interior of the SUV. They are quiet after Sansa finds a station playing local club music, her long hair a whip of auburn out of the window when Sandor turns onto the asphalt road that will lead them towards the old port. It’s all loud bass with strands of Tehano, the rollick-roll-rhythm of rapid fire Spanish a winding spell of otherworldliness that eventually cancels nearly all thought in Rickon’s brain rather than ignite angry fire like music so often does. It is something to nod his head to as he stares out the window, his elbow hanging out over the edge of the car door as he leans against it with Shireen tucked in at his side. He imagines walking south with her hand in his, disappearing into the bustle of a foreign country like fugitives do in the movies. It makes him smile, and before he can help it he turns to her, kisses her temple where her bangs are pinned back.

She hums, something he can feel rather than hear when she tips her face to kiss him back, and once more he forgets himself, eyes closed behind his sunglasses, and it’s the barest touch of her tongue to his that makes him grin.

“Well _that’s_ new,” Arya says from the back, and Shireen pulls away from him with a lowered gaze laugh, and Rickon glares at his sister. She’s smug as a bug in a rug, unbelted and slouched up under Gendry’s arm that stretches out over the back of her seat, her legs crossed with one foot bobbing high in the air, cramped as they are back there.

“Not if you were on the first car ride,” Sandor says from the front seat.

“I feel like they’re going to make fun of us forever,” Shireen murmurs with the tip of her head towards his.

“Is that really such a bad thing?” he says, snatching the flip flop dangling from Arya’s outstretched foot, using it to repeatedly slap the side of her calf. Arya shrieks, tries in vain to kick him, but he didn’t come back as damaged goods without picking up a few skills, and he dodges her attacks with ease. “Besides, she’s the one getting her ass whupped with a shoe, so make fun of _her_.”

Mance’s Beach Club is an outdoor bar shaded with wood beam canopies thatched with dried palm fronds, is round plastic tables and chairs with Corona or Squirt logos all over them, is surrounded on three sides by a low, whitewashed wall to keep the majority of the sand from blowing up and in from the beach. Music slower than what Sansa played in the car is being pumped out through fat speakers installed in the corners of each rectangular canopy so they can provide sound as well as shade. There are a scant handful of people sitting around drinking from sweating bottles of beer or salt-swathed sombrero glasses full of lime green margarita, and despite the fact that it’s only midday, they’re starting to look pretty good to Rickon.

“Hola, amigos, come in, come in, someone will come get your order right away,” says a black haired man sitting at the bar, and immediately he makes Rickon think of that Most Interesting Man in the World ad. This guy could be his son, with the white linen pants and the pale peach button down shirt.

“I bet you five bucks and a blow job that guy is Mance,” Arya whispers to Gendry as they pull two chairs from one table to make an even six at another, and Rickon raises his eyebrows at Shireen when he drags out a chair for her, laughs when she lifts her chin with a sort of sun-rumpled regality.

“I brought a shitload of cash and it sounds like I win either way, so I’ll take you up on that bet,” Gendry says, swinging his chair around and sitting.

“Oh my God, who’s disgusting now?” Sansa says with a wrinkle of her nose, and now that they’re in the dark cool of shade she tosses her sunglasses onto the table, shaking her hair back as she squints towards the bar.

They all remove their shades at her cue, and each gives the place a left and right glance, an up and down and side to side as they get the lay of the land. It’s off season dead, hotter than hell and muggy to boot, and the only other people here are all gringos like them. They’re weather beaten and copper-skinned, leather-necked and middle aged, the hallmarks of American expats determined to fund a Peter Pan lifestyle with retirement funds. Rickon thinks back to the man with the gun outside of Shireen’s; he was middle aged, too, but in a decidedly _non_ -Jimmy Buffet way, balding and pale, dressed all in black. Obvious and poorly skilled, a sore thumb with shitty aim, Rickon doubts he or his ilk would have the talent or wherewithal to sink as undercover as that fat guy in the corner with a parrot tattoo on his bicep.

A woman with skin like café au lait saunters up, her honey hair a toss over her shoulders as she sets down a stack of menus, and Rickon thinks she’s used to be compared to sweet and savory, what with that practiced look she gives to first the men before smiling to the women.

“Hi friends,” she says, her accent a lilt and purr as she winks down at Rickon. “You guys on vacation?”

Rickon shrugs, moves to rest his elbow on the white plastic arm of Shireen’s chair, his hand a dip, his fingers a drift and pluck on the sundress over her thigh. If he means to make a point here, if he means to let her know flirtation isn’t going to get a bigger tip out of him, then he might be right, because she immediately twitches her gaze off of him. But one thing he didn’t mean was to invite Shireen to bare herself to scrutiny.

“Dios mio,” the blonde server says with a sucked in gasp of surprise.

It takes mere seconds for the entire table to ping-pong between the server and Shireen, for five of them to narrow their eyes and glare while the sixth, the woman beneath his hand, simply reaches forward for her sunglasses. His heart hurts when he watches her slide them back onto her nose, the oversized lenses hiding most of her face.

“ _Excuse_ me?” Sandor says, and Rickon grins even though he’d rather be the one to come to Shireen’s defense, because when the woman looks at _him_ she blanches beneath that smooth complexion of hers.

“I’m so sorry, senor, I- ah, I saw a seal, out by the rocks,” she says, swiftly pulling a look of nonchalance over that expression of shock and disgust as she gestures to the faraway ridge of black rock out by the surf.

One glance tells him there’s not so much as a seagull out there in the noonday heat, and when he looks back at her he gives her his best _Fuck You_ expression.

“Six shots of tequila,” he says, “followed by a round of Tecates.” He does not say please and he does not say thank you, and the woman wears her chagrin with a tight smile and a nod before turning back to the bar.

“Well that was just uncalled for,” Arya says.

“Look, believe me, I’m used to it. It’s been, like fourteen years now, you guys. It’s no big deal,” Shireen says.

“You may be used to it but that doesn’t mean I am,” Rickon says.

“It doesn’t mean _any_ of us are,” Gendry says.

“Actually, I am,” Sandor grins. “But that doesn’t mean she can’t go fuck herself, does it?”

Shireen laughs, says _Yeah, she can go fuck herself_ and pulls her glasses back down her nose, pausing a moment before finally pulling them off and tossing them back on to the table. Rickon grins.

“That’s my girl,” he says, and he has her smile when she glances up at him.

They drink the afternoon away, shots with beer chasers or margaritas with salt, and they lick their fingers between orders of tacos camarones and platters of hot tortilla chips covered in brown gravy and queso blanco _,_. As the sun slides down towards the sea the laughter gets louder and more frequent, the conversation fuller with rise and fall and bicker banter, with pointed fingers and crude jokes. They all loosen like unbound hair or frayed rope, slouched in their chairs or with feet in other people’s laps. Shireen ignores any more ribbing as they kiss and kiss and kiss; Arya takes her shirt off and lounges in ripped up jeans shorts and her bikini top; Sansa finds herself in Sandor’s lap; after a few passing vendors, hopeful from the raucous sounds of liquor-loosened debates, Gendry finds himself the proud owner of a baseball hat that says USA on the front.

“You look like a redneck,” Sansa laughs, sweeping her forefinger through the chunky salt on the rim of her glass.

“Brown neck, thank you _very_ much,” Gendry says, reaching over to drain the last of Arya’s kamikaze shot.

“Don’t tell me you’re full,” Rickon says, pointing to the two abandoned shrimp on Shireen’s plate, curled pink and glistening with grease next to a small pile of pickled radish and squeezed wedges of lime.

“I’m stuffed,” she says with a moan of food coma contentment, chasing her last swallow of food with a swig of beer. “Here, do your worst,” she says, and she picks up a shrimp and tosses it at him.

“Still starving,” he says between chews after he catches it in his mouth, and he grins when she chucks the other shrimp at him. He catches it and the radishes she overhand throws his way, though when she flings a discarded lime wedge he ducks just in time.

“Quite an arm your lady has,” says a voice behind him, spiced with an accent like a rich sauce with pepper, and Rickon turns around to see the black haired man from the bar standing behind him, hefting the lime wedge in the palm of one hand while the other is tucked in the pocket of his white linen pants.

“Everything about her’s ‘quite,’” he says with a grin, turning his chair just enough to face the man without craning his neck.

The guy they suspect is Mance is smooth smiles in a face without much wrinkle to it despite the fact that he’s got to be well over forty, despite the fact that he earns his living at an outdoor bar. There’s more to him that’s smooth as well: that undercurrent of power and influence that can only come from a man who can hang around a beach all day in white pants that don’t have a speck of dirt on them. Even the woven leather huaraches on his feet are spotless despite the grit and scrape of sandy wet concrete beneath them.

“I want you all to know that my daughter, the girl who has been serving you this afternoon, she is very apologetic about what happened earlier. Specifically to you, senorita,” he says with a bow of his head in Shireen’s direction.

“It’s okay,” she says with a tipsy dismissive wave of her hand. “Please don’ worry about it.”

“No. It is not okay, and I do worry about it. You are my customer here, this is my establishment, and I do right by my guests. Please, accept this round of drinks on the house,” he says, tossing the lime in a large trash can a few feet away.

The man they now _know_ is Mance outstretches his arm behind him and snaps his fingers. The blonde, his daughter, emerges from behind the bar with a tray of shot glasses and a small, cut crystal bottle of tequila, and when she stops by his side he takes the tray and bows at the waist, bringing the tray to the level of the table.

“Thank you so much,” Shireen says, and Sansa stands from Sandor’s lap to help Rickon take the glasses and bottle.

“Seriously, thank you,” Sandor says after he picks up the bottle and inspects it. The raise of his eyebrow must mean it’s _good_ tequila.

“It is my pleasure, believe me,” he says. “Any friends of Jon Snow are friends of mine,” he says with a wink, and before any of them can say anything he nods and turns on his heel, hand on his daughter’s shoulder as he guides her back to the bar and the cool depths of the small building behind it.

“Well I’ll be damned. How the fuck did he know it’s us?” Rickon says, nodding when Arya slides one of the glasses that Sandor is filling.

“I think you know why, honey. I’m sure Jon told him what we look like, and while anyone can have red hair like Sansa’s, nobody can really do scars like Sandor and me,” Shireen says.

“No one has hair like Sansa’s,” Sandor says before he drains his beer, and Sansa tips her head against his with a close eyed smile.

“Let’s play a drinking game,” Arya says with a grin, plucking a chip from the center platter, driving it through the remaining brown sauce and queso before she pops it in her mouth with a crunch.

The sun disappears, pulling the night sky after her like a child tucking herself in under a blanket, and they are six drunks laughing as the rounds of Never Have I Ever get stupider, more circumstantial and are reduced to obvious attempts to out people as sexual voyeurs or compulsive liars. Rickon now knows that the younger of his sisters is a member of the mile high club, that Shireen broke into a library, that Sansa stole a three pack of lip gloss in high school before she was so distraught she took them back, and that Sandor once beat up a mall cop.

“Okay, now that’s just gross,” Sansa says after Arya forces out of Gendry and Rickon that they each, at completely different times in their lives, have thrown up outside of a moving car after two different underage trips to Nogales. _It was everywhere,_ laughed Gendry. _I had to spend the entire next day hungover and washing Robb’s car,_ said Rickon.

“All right, fine,” Arya says, pointing at her sister with one eye closed. “Fine, little miss lap dance,” she says, wagging her aimed finger at where Sansa sits like a queen on the throne of Sandor’s lap. “Fine, _you_ do the last one. Whatever you want. Never have I ever made my Barbies slow dance, or some shit.”

“Oh, I want to _dance,_ ” Sansa says, pulling Sandor to his feet after she stagger hops out of his arms.

“I’m sobering up now, babe, there is _no_ way I’m dancing,” he says, but still he holds her hand high in the air as she spins for him with her head tipped back and her eyes closed. Rickon smiles to see the look on Sandor’s face as he watches her, because _now_ he gets it. Now he knows.

“Okay, so never have I ever, hmm. _Hmmmm_ ,” Sansa says with a laugh that is low slung in her throat from all the shots they’ve taken. “Oh, I know a nice one,” she says, and she smiles at Rickon while maintaining her ballerina spin. “Never have I ever been in love in Mexico,” she declares with a grand sweep of her arm that belts Sandor right in the ribs, and Rickon feels a drop in his stomach that has nothing to do with the liquor.

Gendry and Arya immediately high five one another and knock back another shot of tequila, his sister swiping her boyfriend’s baseball hat before declaring she’s going to go jump in the ocean.

“You can sober up next hour, baby, it’s only like 9pm,” Sansa says. “Besides, if you have done the thing then you have to _drink_ the thing. And you tell me _every_ day that you are,” she says with a face tilted grin his way when she hands him his shot after downing hers.

“What about you guys? The game is still in session, so it's shots or the beach,” Arya says, kicking her flip flops under the table as she pushes her shorts down to the sandy concrete slab beneath their feet.

He cannot look at her, knows his face probably already _burns_ from the question and the immediate response that leapt up into his chest. _I don’t have to drink, nobody would know,_ he thinks, and the voice in his head has a slur to it unless he’s just not listening properly. _Even if she drinks it doesn’t mean anything, she could have been to Mexico plenty of times,_ he thinks though he hopes she hasn’t.

“Think I’m gonna hafta take that shot,” Shireen says finally as she pushes her empty glass towards the bottle on the table. The sound of her voice is like a net through water, and it scoops him right up.

He finally hazards a look at her, and the glossiness of her gaze is more than enough for him to get drunk on, the little shrug a weak attempt to throw him off the scent. Rickon nods slowly, his head only the slightest swim, his vision the barest of blurs when she bites her lip, her nose a crinkle from her grin.

“Yeah, me too,” he says, and the rest of the night is a fade in and fade out of bright music and loud lights, of salt and lime and sand between his toes, the rushing fizz and foam of waves crashing against their thighs as they wade out to swim with the others, and it’s the weight of her slippery arms around his neck and the tequila taste whenever she kisses him. He took the shot and she did too, and though he forgets why, exactly, he knows they did it _together_ and that it means _something_. Though he forgets why, exactly, when she wraps her legs around him too as he pulls them under the roll of seawater, her chin tucked against his shoulder when he stands back up and they breathe in hot night air, he knows that it means just that.

Together.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> SO! Mance's is based on a real life beach bar in Rocky Point that is sadly no more. It was called Manny's Beach Club and was around in the early 80s. When my dad went there for the first time in 1988, it was little more than six or seven bar stools in the sand. It grew and expanded into a bar, restaurant, motel and night club and I did my best to describe it on a slow, off season day. Unfortunately it was driven under by bad management after Manny himself went on to his greater reward, so I wanted it to live on in fic, and really, there's not much difference between Mance and Manny, just a couple of letters (I do not recall how suave Manny's outfits were, however, since I too used to go do tequila shots before body surfing).


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/128075163448/a-world-alone-chapter-15)

Twice now in as many days they pile into Sandor’s SUV, though today is different in that the sky is choked with clouds, the sun a merciful absence as they barrel towards town here where sand and dirt and soil are the same thing. They are all of them hungover as well, having come back from Mance’s last night only to keep taking shots, to swim half naked under a black sweep of star studded sky.  _Did we, you know, last night?_  Shireen asked Rickon first thing that groggy, green-gilled morning.  _No we didn’t, and I sure as hell hope you’ll remember it when we do,_  and his grin made her smile through the headache, made her dreams sweet when they drifted back to sleep curled up against each other.

He’s got his hand in her hair now, fingers a lazy twist and twirl, twist and twirl as they bump onto the paved street that dagger-shoots them down to Mance’s, though when she leans over to get her phone from her purse, his touch falls away from her hair to rest lightly on her back.

“Is everything okay?” he asks as she taps open her emails, and she nods her head as she scrolls.

“It’s just an email from Davos,” she says, tucking herself back in against him where she’s come to belong these days. “Here,” and she angles the phone so he can read it over her shoulder.

_Hey sugar,_

_Hope all is well down there. Court date is set next month to contest the outdated will, am still trying to find anything to do with the new one. Checking my archived emails on my home computer, trying to get Robert to write a signed statement, etc. The man says he can’t remember anything from the funeral. He’s calling it grief but we know it by the name of cabernet sauvignon._

_Anyways, you keep your chin up and your eyes down. There’s still all a chance that the shooting was a horrible, horrible coincidence (no, I’m not holding my breath). Mrs. Celtigar is keeping an eye out around the neighborhood in case Mel is stupid enough to show up. If we can get her arrested on ANY charges then we could start a sort of paper trail showing that she’s so focused on you. I really wish you would have gone to the cops at the start of this, but now isn’t the time for a lecture so I will spare you._

_Oh, by the way, I did find out that your father used an LLC to make a few discreet purchases, down there in Mexico actually. The LLC is called Storm’s End. I’m trying to find out more and I’ll get back to you once I figure it out._

_Love,_

_Davos_

Shireen sighs and lets her head thunk back against Rickon’s shoulder. It all makes her feel like she’s floundering, a half drowned flail, a small and insignificant blob just barely holding itself together before dissolution. She feels lost and stupid and little.

“At least there’s good news about Storm’s End, whatever it is,” he says, using his index finger to scroll up to reread the email. “Although- nah, never mind,” he says.

“What, are you going to tell me I was an idiot for not calling the police?” she says, voice sharp and high because if there’s something that has haunted her throughout this entire ordeal, that’s it.

“You’re not an idiot, Shir, so cut it out,” he murmurs with a kiss to her hair as Sandor pulls into the parking lot of Mance’s, and she slumps and sighs and now she feels like a child. “Just because you feel like beating yourself up doesn’t mean I do.”

She can almost taste tequila and lime to be back here so soon, can almost feel underwater sand sift beneath her feet when they get out of the car. It all makes her think of last night, of shots and night swimming, of something like truth and dare though that wasn’t the game they played.  _Something about it all wasn’t a game, either,_  she thinks, and suddenly the  _Did we, you know, last night?_  from earlier that morning takes on a whole other meaning. Her head’s in those clouds when they walk under the palm frond cabana, Rickon shaped clouds that make it hard to focus until Mance materializes from the room behind the bar.

“ _Buenos dias_ , my friends,” he says with a smile, with the outstretch of his arms like he’s a prophet, and he laughs at their lackluster replies of murmurs and mutters and the blinking of bloodshot eyes. “Come inside where it’s cool and you can have something to eat,” he says, ushering them inside.

It’s cool as he said and dark as well, white tile floors making the slap of Shireen’s flip flops echo. It reminds her of the condo in Key West, a little like the set of  _Golden Girls_ with tropical style furniture and ferns, with two huge potted birds of paradise in the corner. He seats them at a long rectangular table with hand carved rosettes all along the edges. Shireen traces them with her fingers after Mance pulls out a chair for her and she says  _Gracias,_ lifts her eyes as the lithe forty-something year old plays host to Sansa and Arya as well, bowing his head when they thank him.

There are glasses of ice standing attention, bottles of sparkling water and Coca Cola in the center of the table, and as if they’ve rehearsed it beforehand Gendry, Sandor and Rickon all turn and ask their lovers for their preference, low hum rumbles of men’s voices as they take their orders.  _I’m Rickon’s lover,_ she thinks as he pours cheerful fizzy bubbles over her ice, because not going all the way doesn’t mean they haven’t been loving on each other.  _I’m someone’s somebody,_ she thinks as she takes an ice-on-the-teeth swallow of sparkling water, because he belongs at her side just as much as she does his.

“So,” Mance says once they’re all seated, hands a clasp behind his head as he leans back in his chair at the head of the table. “Juan – Jon, sorry – he told me what’s going on.  _Señorita_ , for what it’s worth, I am sorry. Bad blood is horrible, especially in a family.”

“She’s got a new family now,” Rickon says, quick and rough like the striking of a match, and when Shireen looks up it’s just in time to see Arya and Sansa share a smiling glance, to see Gendry grin and nod when their eyes meet. Her heart does a pleasant sort of pit-pat, rain on a leaf, a fish in a stream, a sugar cube in champagne.

“Good, good. I’m glad to hear it. We all need family,” he says, and then he says  _Ah_ when there is the metallic clatter of kitchen sounds down a hallway and Val emerges with a tray full of plated food. She’s in a lemon colored sundress and golden gladiator sandals to match her bracelets, has her blond hair up high in a ponytail, and despite the huge tray balanced on her palm and shoulder, she still has the grace and skill to sway her hips as she walks.

“ _¿Dónde están los otros_?” she says, stopping short halfway into the room when they all turn and look up at her.

“They’re not here yet; our American friends were the first to arrive,” Mance says. “Come, come, serve our guests,  _mamita,_ ” he says as he sits up and smiles to them all. “I took the liberty of choosing your entrees for you; considering the fun you had last night I thought ceviche might be the best. We make it Peruvian style here, since Valentina’s mother was from Peru.  _Leche de tigre_  is the best hangover cure,” he says with his breezy white linen smiles, his crinkle-eyed gaze that flits here and there, landing on everyone’s faces to gauge reactions.

Shireen’s mouth waters when Val sets down the dishes, because even though it’s still midmorning she can’t resist a good seafood dish, and sitting in front of her is a martini glass full of white fish and sweet potato, kernels of corn and red onion, bright fans of cilantro leaves sprigging on top. The desert sand of her brain throbs despite three Advil, and if she has to bathe in this  _leche de tigre_  then by God she’ll do it.

“This is delicious,” Sansa says with a happy hum, licking her fingers when a drizzle of tiger’s milk finds its way down her knuckle.

“ _Gracias, Señora_ ,” Mance says, and now it’s Shireen’s turn to share a grin with Arya because the implication of marriage makes Sansa blush and Sandor choke when he takes a swallow of Coke.

“Oh no, I’m not- we aren’t- I mean, oh,” Sansa says, dropping her gaze to her lap with a nervous chuckle before she slides it over and up to Sandor, who clears his throat against his closed fist as he looks at her with his eyebrows raised.

“My apologies. This young man said family, and so I assumed,” he says.

 _Sly old weasel,_  Shireen thinks when Gendry comes to their rescue by asking about a certain piece of art on the wall, because while the others dutifully look at the painting, she looks at Mance, and that casual smile of his has turned to an out and out grin.

For some time they are quiet as they eat, Sandor and Rickon two suspicious looks at their ceviche before they join in, and the only sounds for a while are the scrape of tortilla chips against the bowl, the clink of forks inside glasses, all slurp and swallow as they try to drown their hangovers with this tiger’s milk. When she’s finished she feels all lit up on the inside, citrus-bright with tang on her tongue and fresh protein in her belly, and she’s thinking maybe the next time she’s going to drink all night she’s going to do it in Peru.

“Now, I’m hoping you all feel better,” Mance says once the glasses and forks are hollow clatters against each other, and he stands to help his daughter clear the table. “Go on,  _flaca_ , set them in the kitchen and come back.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says with a smile and roll of her eyes, a wink to Shireen that makes her feel a lot better about the first time they met.

“We can’t thank you enough for your help,” Shireen says once Val disappears, and she feels squirrel-nervous to speak up with this man at the head of the table, this man who does deals with Border Patrol, with people on the run, with—

“ _’Eyy, Manny. ¿Qué pasó? ¿Dónde está mi chica? Eh?_ _Cariño, dónde está?_ ” says a man’s voice, and Shireen twists in her chair to see the man from the border, Jon Snow, though now he’s far more relaxed than he was up there in his military greens and baseball hat.

Jon wears an oversized button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, jeans and flip flops and looks for all in the world like he’s a tourist instead of a high ranking official of the Border Patrol. He’s got a black duffel bag in one hand, uses the other to remove his sunglasses and tuck them in the pocket of his shirt.

“Oh,” he says when the lovestruck look in his eyes fades to let recognition take its place. “Hey, guys, sorry I’m late,” he says with a nod to Rickon, his in and out switch of language sinuous and fluid. “Tormund’s out in the parking lot, he’ll be right in.”

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Arya says with a grin as she swirls her ice around her glass with a straw, and when Shireen looks back to Jon she sees he’s grinning.

“Hey, brat, how the hell’ve you been, huh?” and he laughs outright as he ducks his head in time to dodge the ice cube Arya flings at him.

“Juan?” Val says as she walks out drying her hands on a white dish towel, and she’s nothing but a brilliant smile, a beam of sunshine when she rests her eyes on him.

“ _Sí, soy yo_ ,” he says as he turns to face her, and he’s got a slow simmer grin as she winds her arms around his neck, bracelets a jingle as she pulls him down for a kiss, dish towel dropped like a flag of surrender to the tile floor.

“Ehh,” Mance says, shaking his head and shielding his eyes with hand. “Save it for the altar, Juanito. This is business, not a fun trip to the beach.”

“Don’t I know it,” he says, kissing Val once more before guiding her to the table with a familiar hand on the small of her back. “I sure as hell didn’t pack my swim fins and snorkel this morning,” he says, setting the duffel bag on the cleared table with a heavy, dull thud.

 _No, he sure didn’t,_  Shireen thinks with a wide eyed gaze at the bag as he unzips it, as Rickon, Arya and Sandor sit forward to look inside, but Shireen doesn’t need to, because she knows.  _He packed guns._

Jon and Tormund bring tension with them, tucked in that bag along with boxes of .45 and 9mm ammunition, discreet leather holsters, spare clips, semiautomatic handguns. Each piece is rolled up in a t-shirt and tied up in a plastic grocery bag. The room falls quiet, not that there was much idle chit chat before, and Gendry and Shireen’s discomfort is palpable to Rickon as Jon sits and unrolls gun after gun after gun. Mance is polite boredom, more interested in his cuticles as he picks at his nails, and Sansa and Val share similar expressions of indifference. His oldest sister has been around this sort of thing her entire life, and it’s clear to Rickon that Val must have been too, that it wasn’t just being raised in the kitchens of a beachside bar, that Mance has more layers to him than simple entrepreneur.

“You still have that .45 I gave you?” Jon says with an upward glance at Rickon, his hands busy as they push round after round into a magazine.

“Yeah,” Rickon says, leaning forward to pull the gun from the waistband of his jeans where the piece was a dull point of pressure into his skin. He double checks the safety and sets it down on the table, tries and fails to ignore Shireen’s mouse-small gasp of surprise to see that he was packing heat. Rickon shrugs.

“What did you expect, baby? It’s my job,” he says, cupping his palm against the edge of her jaw, his thumb a brush and rub against her cheek.

“Well, but you’re- I’m not paying you anymore,” she says with a frown, and Rickon shakes his head.

“That doesn’t mean it’s not still my job, Shir. I’m your wall, remember?” he says, because there is still the soldier in him who takes his orders seriously, who will take them to the grave, but there’s something else in there too now, and its heart beats in time to the sound of her name.

“There’s a good man, then,” Val says with a firm nod, her body slanted in a lean against the arm of her chair to bring her face close to Jon’s. “Good man like you,  _papi,_ ” she murmurs against his ear, still loud enough for everyone to hear, and Jon snorts a laugh, glances at her with a small grin, all satisfaction and unspoken pride to be so described.

“Well, I’m glad to hear it, Ric,” he says. “I’ve been putting feelers out up in Lukeville. Turns out earlier this morning there were some guys asking about a girl with scars on her face, trying to see if whether or not she’d passed through. Said they were her brothers and that she had run off with some no good guy,” he says, and now when he looks up from his task it’s to give a sympathetic glance at Shireen. “Sorry.”

“Oh my God,” she whispers, her hands flying to her face where fingers shake against her open mouth. She turns a terrified glance to Rickon and when she speaks it’s as if her words are beads on a string, all one after another with no pause between. “Oh my God, Rickon, she found out, how did she find out?”

He sighs, scooting his chair back from the table and angling it towards hers, and he nudges his foot against the leg of her chair until it’s facing him, pulls it by the armrests until their knees bump together. This is what he was afraid of.

“I don’t think it was smart of Davos to send you that email, not when his computers were already tampered with. Who knows how many passwords and personal emails they found combing through those things. That’s uh, I think that’s how they found you. When did he send the email?”

“He, oh,” Shireen says, rummaging through her purse on the floor under the table until she pulls out her phone. “Last night around seven,” she whispers. “Oh my  _God_ , Rickon, they’re here to kill me. They’ve followed us to fucking Mexico to  _kill_   _me_ ,” she says, tears springing to her eyes as she drops the phone back in her purse.

“Hey, what did I just say, huh?” he says, leaning over their knees as he holds her face in his hands to snag her attention. Shireen wide-eyed blinks, disturbing the hanging balance of tears on her lower lashes, and from this close up he can see the shake of them before they spill over. It’s like a knife twisting in his heart, watching her cry.  _So many tears._   “I’ve said it a hundred times if I’ve said it once, babe: I’m not going to let  _anything_  happen to you, okay?”

“None of us are,” Sandor says, reaching for the 9mm Jon has just loaded, and Rickon gives him a nod of thanks when the big vet catches his eye.

“Okay,” Shireen whispers, though the panic comes no closer to leaving her expression. It looks like it builds on itself, a little storm of terror there in the deep blue and the wet of her eyes.

“We’ve got your back, Shireen,” Jon says.

“ _Ellos_   _pagaron_?” Tormund says, his tattooed forearms a flex as he plays with one of the partly loaded mag clips, pushing down the top bullet with his thumbnail over and over. He glances first to Mance and then to Jon, who is shooting him a dirty look of warning.

“This isn’t a money job, this is a family job, okay? Their brother Robb, he’s like a brother to  _me._ And let’s not forget, you owe me,  _Cabrón._ They were going to put you in cuffs at the border last month and I got your ass off the hook.”

“Fine, okay, boss, calm down,” Tormund says, rolling his eyes as he picks up a bullet and pushes it into the clip.

“You’re going to keep an eye out on the house in Las Conchas, right?” Sansa says with a concerned frown from across the table. “Just until we figure out the next step?”

“Absolutely,” Jon says. “I’ve texted with your brother, by the way, and he says he’s going to come into town tomorrow. Another set of able hands on the job will be a good thing.”

“Thank Christ,” Arya mutters as she pulls out her phone, thumbs a  _taptap_  as she presumably sends out a text of her own to their eldest sibling.

“Tell me more about these guys at the border check,” Rickon says.

Jon tells them as he finishes his task at hand, the work going quicker once Arya finally says  _Oh just give me one,_  and soon Sandor is pushing bullets one by one into clips while Tormund and Jon unwrap and unroll each piece. Rickon would join in too but he remembers the look of trepidation on Shir’s face when he pulled out his weapon, and so he keeps his hands to himself, or rather to her when she comes back from the bathroom and he pulls her onto his lap.

He tells them there were four of them in a silver sedan, as nondescript as their car, khaki shorts and polos, sunglasses and a couple of bald spots. Middle of the road in every which way, as impossible to pick out of a lineup as finding rednecks at a tractor pull.

“No big men like you guys,” Jon says to Sandor as the latter man pushes a clip into a .45 and racks the piece forward. “Not pretty women like you three,” he says, grinning to himself when Val sniffs imperiously. “Just your run-of-the-mill middle aged gringos, a dime a dozen.”

“That could be in our favor or against us,” Arya says, sliding a handgun into a flat leather holster before she sits forward to tuck it away against her lower back. “Either they’re higher end and know to dress the part, which would suck, or else they’re just dipshit idiots like the first one,” she says, sitting back with a wiggle as she self-adjusts. “Which, you know, would rock.”

“So what happened, what did the BP agents tell them?” Gendry asks. He’s leaning back in his chair though not in a display of smug comfort and ease like Mance; his body language makes it clear that he’s not into guns; that his presence is for moral support and not for the artillery.

“They didn’t say anything, either way. I’ve told a few of them to keep absolutely mum on your presence here. They’re trustworthy men, they’ll do as I ask them.”

“Yeah, well,” Rickon says from where he’s sitting beneath and behind Shireen, here where her arm is draped across his shoulders, here where he feels the true weight of what he has to do as she tries not to cry in his arms. There’s a rise of grit inside him, something he hasn’t felt in many, many months, and it seeps in like cement, graveled and soupy before it hardens. “Talk is cheap, Jon, it takes money to buy liquor,” he says, because he has no idea who these guys are, because it’s easier to say  _You can count on me_  than it is to fucking prove it.

“Ric, it’s okay,” Shireen murmurs between two sniffles, and she lifts her hand to run her fingers through his hair.

 “ _Qué_?” Tormund asks, shooting Rickon a puzzled look before he turns to Jon. “Liquor? We going to a liquor store?”

“No, he means uh, he means  _Pon tu dinero dónde está tu boca_. Sort of,” Jon says with a narrow eyed shake of his head as he looks at Rickon. “Thinks I’m writing checks with my mouth that my ass can’t cash.”

“Oh. Oh, heh, that’s funny,” Tormund says with a great belt-out of laughter. “This kid, he’s got an attitude, ey? Me too,” he says with a nod as he folds his thick arms across the barrel of his chest.

“Listen,” Jon says, pushing the last weapon to the center of the table before he leans forward on his elbows, his hands clasped in front of his chin. “It’s not cheap talk, Ric. It’s like a brotherhood up there, all right? I’m tight with them like I’m tight with Robb. Plus I’m a higher rank then they are. I can hand their asses to them any time I want, and they know that. You trust Robb?”

“Of course I trust Robb,” Rickon says with only a little indignation, and he wants to say _But I don’t trust you_ because his memories of Jon Snow are hazy at best.

“Well then you trust me by default, because your brother does. We’re here to help, okay?  Just- you know, keep your head down, lie low. If you  _have_  to go somewhere, or if you decide to head back stateside let us know and we can shadow you. You need more groceries, Mance has a buddy he can send over to the house. You need anything else, more ammo, more protection, you let  _me_  know. All right? Let me help you,” he says, flicking his gaze up to Shireen before settling it back on Rickon. “Let me help  _her._ ”

“Yeah,” he says after a while, because Jon played his cards well just now, bringing Shireen into it. He’ll walk into open fire no problem, but there’s no way in hell he’s letting it happen to her. Not with words like  _Love_  trying to dance their way off his tongue. “All right, Jon.”

“Good,” Jon says.

 

“You’re kind of like Annie Oakley, huh,” Gendry says later once they’re back at the house and Arya slides the gun out from the waistband of her shorts, setting it on the dining room table. He’s looking at her with a sort of impressed confliction, a tear between finding it scary and finding it sexy. Shireen knows that feeling well enough.

“Kinda,” she grins. “Wanna see how they come apart? If you’re going to stick around, buster, you might as well get used to them."

“Take the bullets out of it and  you can show me whatever you want,” he says, and Arya picks the holstered weapon up with a nod before they disappear back to their room.

Shireen doesn’t feel like Annie Oakley. She thinks of the old sharpshooter legend and sighs, feels more like a target, a victim, the punchline to a deadly joke, and she’s sick and tired of it. She has half a mind to march herself into Gendry and Arya’s room to learn a thing or two herself, but then there is the sound of a high squeal and the deep roll of masculine laughter, and so she stops herself.

Sansa and Sandor are curled up on the sofa watching some old movie Sansa found in the credenza under the television, a soft and sleepy world unto themselves. She hugs herself as she stands in the kitchen, gazing out at the slow steady undulation of waves outside. Back and forth, forever and ever, pulled by the moon, the same old same old, and yet each wave is different to her. It’s mesmerizing even from this distance, with glass and the gauze of curtain between her and the sea, and she lets it steal her thoughts away, this lazy lap of ocean against the sand, this on-and-on beneath a pale grey sky. It’s why she jumps when Rickon sidles up behind her, his body a stoop so he can rest his chin on her shoulder as he slides his arms around her.

“There you are,” he murmurs, the scruff of his unshaved face a delightful tease of sensation, a rub and a scratch as he presses a kiss to the slope between her shoulder and her neck.

“Here I am,” she says with a sigh. _Stuck in Mexico, stuck in this house, with no inkling of where to turn to next._

“Come swimming with me,” he says as if he reads her mind. “Not as fun as drunken swimming, I know, but at least the sun’s gone and it won’t be so hot out,” he says.

“Are you asking because you want me to go swimming or because you don’t want to let me out of your sight?” she says, thinking of how her arm brushed the butt of his gun when she wrapped her arm around him walking out of Mance’s.  She knows that if she turns in his arms and presses her hand to the low of his back she will feel it again. It’s safety and danger, threat and promise, all of it sickeningly surreal.

“Both,” he says, simple and true. “I’ve never seen you in a swimsuit, Trouble, come on. Come swimming with me,” and despite everything Shireen laughs, even as he puts his hands to pasture, lets them roam up under her shirt so the bare skin of her belly has the touch of him.

“You’ve seen me  _naked_ , Ric, and I was in a swimsuit last night.”

“Mmm, naked,” he says with exaggerated sensuality. “Besides, I don’t remember a fuckin’ thing about last night except tequila, and I’m more than willing to forget  _that._  Come on. Come swimming.”

“All right, fine,” she says, and he hums with satisfaction, the cat with cream, the boy getting his way. “I’ll change and come down, you go on ahead. I’m serious, Hooligan, I’ll be  _right_  there,” she says when he straightens to his full height and cranes his neck to look down at her with suspicion. “It’s not like I’m all alone in the house, honey, Jesus. Go for a goddamned swim and I’ll be right there.”

He’s backward glances and raised eyebrows as he takes the tiled steps from the patio down to the beach, and even though it’s been a weird few days and an intense morning, he can still make her smile, still make her shake her head at the giddy school girl thing she’s got going on for him. Her head’s right back in those clouds of his as she changes, tossing her shirt and shorts next to her purse on their bed, and as she ties on her bikini top she can hear the buzzing of her phone from the front pouch of her Fossil crossbody bag.

Shireen stands in her bikini and bare feet as she opens up her phone, half dreading it’s some sick message from Mel, some  _I’m coming for you, bitch!_ message meant to make her cry. But she smiles with relief when she sees it’s Davos again, heeding her warning to stay off emails from now on.

**Davos:** Storm’s End is a sailboat.

**Shireen:** What??? He’s already got a boat, or should I say MEL has a boat, the Windproud

**Davos:** He’s got another one. It’s down there near you at a marina in Cholla Bay. You still have your keys?

Shireen frowns, bends down to rifle through her purse until she can feel the jingle of metal and the strange round keychain they’re attached to, and then she sucks in a shark breath of realization.

**Shireen:** I’m so stupid, of COURSE they’re boat keys, omg.

She snaps a picture of them and sends it to Davos before sprinting out of the room, keys in one hand and Rickon’s dog’s tags in the other so they don’t bang her in the chest and face as she hurries through the house and out the back door, down the steps and across the hot sand. Rickon stands in the middle of the sea, and she smiles when he puts his hands together and dives through an oncoming wave just before the surf breaks apart into white sparkly sea foam.

“Ric,” she calls out when he resurfaces, and she lets go of the tags to wave at him as she runs towards him, the sand a peppery bite on her legs as it flies up from each footfall. "Rickon!"

He turns when he hears her, immediately comes charging through the water towards her, half a trudge and half a swim until they’re standing face to face knee deep in water, Rickon dripping wet and Shireen dry as a bone until he reaches out for her. A hand to her cheek, her shoulder, a soaked slide down the length of her arm.

“Are you okay? Is everything all right? Did someone come to the house?” he says, making to walk past her to where his shorts and shirt are in a pile higher up on the sand, where she knows his gun is.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she says, snagging him by the wrist to keep him from leaving the water. “Sorry if I freaked you out, I was just excited. Davos just texted me about Storm’s End,” she says, and that captures his attention, makes him turn back to her with his twisted swim trunks and the sharp backward knock of his head to get the wet hair off his forehead.

“Yeah?" he says, catching his breath from the swim and the startle she gave him.

“It’s a sailboat, Ric, and I can’t believe I never realized it before. I’m such an idiot,” she says. “I should have recognized the type of keychain. Look,” she says, and without further ado she opens her hand and drops the keys into the water, much to his surprise.

“Hey, don’t- what the fuck did you- oh,” he says, staring down at the keys as they ride the little eddies of water between their legs, as the ping-pong shaped keychain floats.  _Storm’s End_ can just be read on them before they twist from the ebb and flow of the tide. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“I don’t know what it means, exactly, but Davos said the boat’s not far from here, just over in Cholla Bay," she says, bending down to pick up the keys.

“That’s just on the other side of the old port. That’s like twenty, thirty minutes away, max,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “I was- I know we’re supposed to lie low, but I really want to check this boat out," and she explains how her dad was not a man to keep secrets, that he was always so frank and point blank with everything. "If he kept this such a secret, then I want to see why."

He frowns at her, squinting without his sunglasses despite the overcast sky, or maybe because of it since it's still bright out here with the bounce of light between the clouds and the sea. Finally he nods, lifting a hand to run his wet fingers across her brow, pushing her bangs to the side. He squeezes a lock of hair between his thumb and forefinger, giving it a twist as his fingers slide down to the very tips. Rickon inhales deeply and blows it out through his mouth as he looks up at her.

"Okay, we can go check it out. But I want Jon and Tormund there, and I think we should wait until Robb comes down, too. I want- I can't let it happen again, what happened outside your house, Shireen. That was too close a call. I'm not letting it happen again," he says.

“Sure, whatever you think is best. This is your show, all the way,” she says quickly, happy and relieved that they have a next step to take, that she’s not just idling here waiting to be attacked. _I’m no Annie Oakley, but at least I’m doing something._ Rickon makes her smile when he takes her by the hands, her dad’s boat keys pressed between their palms, and he walks them backwards through the waves.

It’s warm water, a salt and seaweed slide against her shaved legs, and they stop once they’re past the crash of surf, out in the gentle rolling hills of sea swells and dips, and he’s tall enough to drop down to his knees and still have his head above water. She wraps her arms around his neck, her chin on his shoulder as she lets the sea try and tug her back to shore by the legs, as she lets Rickon play anchor with his hands an occasional drift down her back or in her hair. Shireen stares at the keys in her hand, swipes her thumb across _Storm’s End,_ wonders what they’ll find, wonders if her father left anything at all for her there.

“I wish you could have met my dad,” she murmurs when she finally closes her eyes and tips her face into his neck. He tastes like salt when she kisses him. “I wish he could see how you take care of me.”

“Me too, honey. Me too,” he says, his arm coming around her back to draw her in against his chest, to bring her legs down to where she just can’t quite reach the sand. But she has the wall of him to cling to, and she wraps her legs around his middle so she can hug him with her whole body. “And I bet he’d be pretty proud to see how well you take care of me.”

“Oh,” she says with a huff of laughter and a small, happy smile as she runs her fingers through his wet hair. “There’s really nothing to it,” she says, because falling for Rickon is one of the easiest things Shireen has ever done.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to my dear buddy FrozenSnares for the help in Spanish. Thanks for those accents, bb! <3<3<3


	16. Chapter 16

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/128373714718/a-world-alone-chapter-16)

Four nights they’ve spent side by side or all curled up, four nights in some variation of limb-tangle, though sometimes he wonders if the first time counts since that was chance and not intention. The first night they slept. The second they tossed and turned, talked so far down into night that it turned to dawn, both of them troubled and haunted, both of them trying to hold the other up. The third they did God knows what, staggering up from the water drenched in seawater and tequila, the bed so streaked with sand the next morning the had to strip it and move to the other room, this dark room of nightmares they’re sleeping in now. The fourth night together and it is as if the old demons that rose up in Rickon’s dreams have stolen into Shireen’s, her sleep is so fitful. He imagines their black footprints staining these sheets he writhed in when his nightmares claimed him, wonders if they mark her with tiptoes as they creep and peek their way into her thoughts.

“Nonono,” she murmurs, her shoulders a sudden tight vise before she gasps and her body jerks her nearly out of his arms. “ _No_ ,” she gasps against his chest, and he knows she’s reliving it, the hail of bullets and the fall to the grass, the fear and the heaviness, the panic that comes when your life is handed to someone else by mistake. He knows it as truly as if he follows his demons and strolls right through her slumber.

Rickon winces, shushes, runs his fingers down her hair, but does his best not to move her overmuch, not to bring her out of it screaming her head off like he has done so often in the past. An earlier glance at his phone tells him it is past 3am, and the old familiar burn under his eyelids tells him he hasn’t slept much if at all. It’s like pulling on cold wet clothes; uncomfortable and chilling and yet yours all yours for the claiming and no one else’s.

Tomorrow –  _today, technically,_ he thinks – has its immovable weight on him, but so does the feeling of being between a rock and a hard place, no matter what reassurance he gives to Shireen. And that’s the only reason he’s interested in this stupid sailboat, because it’s literally all they have. He has no problem hunkering down to wait out a storm, but giving up completely doesn’t sit well with him either; he’d have her get what she is owed. And he thinks he’d like to kick Mel’s teeth in.

Shireen sniffs in her sleep and exhales, jerks her head against his chest so violently she almost knocks it up into his jaw, and like that she’s gone, flinging herself away from him to curl up in the center of the mattress.

“My poor girl,” he whispers, sliding his arm from beneath her with as little disturbance as possible.

He’d be lying if he said it didn’t sting a bit, that he cannot give her comfort tonight, but then again he’s wide awake and restless, can take none from her that he so desperately wishes to provide.  _Two little ships side by side and lost at sea,_  he thinks, but that only serves to remind him, and so Rickon sits up with a sigh, swings his legs over the edge of the bed and stands.

He takes a piss in the bathroom joining their original bedroom, blinking owlishly in the bright yellow light before finishing and flushing the toilet, hoping it doesn’t wake her. Shitty sleep is still better than none at all.

The house is quiet and dark for the most part as he pads cat-quiet and barefoot down the hall and out into the main room to get a bottle of water from the kitchen. Here, the only light comes from those old fashioned Christmas lights strung up outside, the only sound from the stereo receiver playing old jazz from within the open credenza against the wall. For a split second it’s like he’s wandered into another time, soft light and sound and not a soul to account for it all, and he half expects to see a youthful Mrs. Celtigar come sauntering into the room with a martini shaker in one hand and a lit cigarette in the other.

It’s why he jumps and startles and then stops a moment, transfixed as he is by the sight unfolding for him just past the open sliding doors.  Sandor and Sansa come into view, his sister walking –  _no –_ dancing backwards as Sandor leads her, the press of his hand to her back moving so that he can push her away. She tilts her head back with her eyes closed as Sandor smiles and spins her out, hand holding hers in a long armed outstretch before he pulls her back in against his chest. For a moment Rickon thinks of his eldest sister’s old jewelry box, the one with the ballerina turning in place, the one he and Bran broke when their GI Joes needed a hostage to rescue.  _Except this time the dancer is not alone,_  he thinks as Sandor dips her down to kiss her.

Rickon smiles with a shake of his head as he keeps to the edge of the room and slinks into the dark kitchen, memory guiding him to the cabinet where they’ve stored extra water so he won’t disturb them with the light from the fridge. The song fades away and silence takes over, and he’s heading back with his opened bottle of water when he hears the hiss of static and radio feedback. Suddenly there is the feel the salt of sweat under his helmet and the grit of windblown sand on his face.

_Ranger, don’t you dare leave that truck –ffffttt—did you hear me, soldier? Return and head back to— shhhhhhffffff –turn the fuck back, Stark, that is a fucking order! Leave them! Leave them now! – fffsssshhhh—Goddammit, sir, he’s not list—_

“What was that, did you hear that?” Woman’s voice. Scared. Rickon twitches.

“The front door’s locked, babe, don’t worry. It’s probably just one of the others.” Man’s voice. Deep. He’d cock his gun if he had one.

“We should check just to be- oh my God, Rickon, what the hell, are you okay?” says his sister, and Rickon turns to look up her, slack jawed and shaking. She is backlit with a yellow orange glow, her hair like flame. He smells burning fuel.  

“Yeah, I’m- yeah,” he says, realizing his hands are empty and his feet are wet.  _Where the fuck was I just now?_  he thinks as he stares down at the water bottle on the floor, at the water puddling around him. He lifts his eyes to squint across the mostly dark room towards the tiny red light on the stereo and shakes his head.

“He probably didn’t realize we were outside, I’m thinking,” Sandor says quietly once he steps through the open door behind Sansa, nodding his head up and down twice, nice and slow.

“Yeah,” Rickon says, locking eyes with his friend as he mimics the gesture, two deliberate nods. “Yeah, you just surprised me, is all,” he says, and he blinks in confusion, lost in the rush of his own pulse, watches as Sansa sweeps in and stoops down to pick up the dropped bottle of water.

“Here, there’s still water in it, you don’t want to waste this stuff,” she says with a soft glow smile as she hands it to him.

 _She doesn’t know where you went,_  he thinks as he nods and thanks her, takes the wet bottle from her.  _But do you, anymore? Oh yes,_  he answers himself as he numbly walks back to his and Shireen’s bedroom, slipping and nearly falling with his wet feet and suddenly unsure legs.  _I never really left._

“Where’d you go,” Shireen mumbles when he sets the bottle down on the nightstand, wiping his damp hand on his pajama pants before sliding back into bed.

“Nowhere,” he says, scooting to the middle of the bed where she’s on her back. “Nowhere, I just got some water, that’s all,” he says, closing his eyes as he rests his head on her chest, desperate to drown the sound of his own heartbeat with hers, to kill the static in his head that never seems to truly fade out.

 

He’s curled up against her side, head on her chest with an arm wrapped like a vise around her, and when she wakes it’s from a brutal dream, lying in the grass with Rickon’s dead weight above her as the bullets fire into his back, over and over again, and when she wakes it’s with a terrified gasp.

“Rickon,” she says, shaking him awake to prove her dream wrong, to feel the expansion of his ribs as he breathes, to watch him lift his head and look up at her with a sleepy frown.

“What, what is it?” he says, dragging himself up onto an elbow as he wipes the corners of his mouth with thumb and forefinger. The light is muted and muzzy, late morning likely paired with another overcast sky, and it greys him out, darkens the shadows under his eyes and the dips beneath his cheekbones. Shireen rests her palm against his jaw, fingers curling in to pet him.

“Nothing,” she says after a long moment, ignoring the deep sorrowful tug deep in her belly at the listless look in his eyes when he nods and rolls away from her, sitting up with his legs hanging off the mattress. “Are you all right?” she asks, sitting up to follow him, to scoot to the edge of the bed and sit beside him.

“Bad sleep is all,” he says with a shake of his head. “Nothing I’m not used to,” he says, and she hears the closing of a door in his words, the slow pull of a window shade over the lovely view of wilderness she’s had for days now.

“Same here,” she murmurs, shaking her head in confusion at this stiff and sore start to their day, this bruise of a morning, this wince of a wakeup. Shireen gets to her feet, up on her toes as she stretches her legs, walks to the closed door and lingers there a moment with her hand on the knob before turning around.

He’s resting his elbow on his knee and his head in his hand, pushing and rubbing his fingers against his forehead as if trying to erase his thoughts, and it makes her wonder just how bad that sleep of his was. She wonders what someone’s love feels like for the other person, if it’s something that can seep in and flood up, drown out the nasties that infest thoughts, dreams, the beating of a heart. She is in love with him. It’s a sweet river flow of truth that courses through her, something like syrup or molten gold, warm and bubbling, priceless though he bought it so inexpensively from her. Just the grasp of his hand and the smile in his eyes, the pull that’s been here between them, she realizes, long before they either of them recognized it. But here, now, it’s a world that lacks color and flavor, lacks fat richness and the luxury of openness. A low, snarling morning, head to the ground, wary with its hackles up. He sleeps poorly if at all and he suffers for it, she holds him in her arms and provides him no relief, and so she opens her mouth to coax him back to her.

“Ric, are you okay? You seem- you don’t seem like yourself,” she says, walking towards him, her fingers dropping from the doorknob.

“I’m fine, okay? Jesus, Shir, you know I can’t sleep. This isn’t rocket science,” he snaps, lifting his head to look up at her, wounded-animal-sharp.

It is the first time he has ever bitten into her, and it hurts as surely as if he used his teeth instead of his words. She shakes her head and takes a step back, away from the rattlesnake shake of him, the warning hiss and the spit, and that seems to snap him out of it.

His shoulders slump before he gets to his feet, a twist of muscle as he turns towards her with an outstretched hand. “Wait, I’m sorry. Fuck, I shouldn’t have—” he starts, but a sudden boom of noise, the slamming open of the front door and the eruption of conversation, interrupts him and makes them both jump.

“Hey lovebirds, Robb and Dace just got here,” Arya says with a knock on their bedroom door before she opens it, half hanging in the room with a wide grin on her face. “Now we can fuck some shit  _up,_ ” she says, oblivious to the nauseous tension she has just sliced into.

“Goddammit, Arya we could’ve been naked or something,” Rickon says, funneling his irritation and rancor her way, though she deflects it with a shrug and a backwards retreat into the hallway.

“Thank God you weren’t, I guess,” she says. “Come on, Robb bought some shrimp downtown on his way over, Sansa’s going to make fajitas.”

Shireen uses the interruption as an excuse to flee, holes up in the other bedroom to get dressed, and he’s a stony expression of brooding confliction when she opens the door again to find him leaning against the wall across from her, arms folded across his bare chest, pajama pants slung low enough to show the points of his hipbones. Even now with this snag between them he gives her pause, and it takes her a blink and a swallow before she lifts her head and walks past him.

“Shir, please,” he says, but she’s not all heart on her sleeve for nothing, and if he wants to shut her out, well then. She still has the keys to herself, can lock it all up and fasten the storm shutters just as well as he.

“Excuse me,” she says, ducking her head as she tucks her hair behind her ears, sidestepping the grasp he tries on her elbow, and she has the ghost of his touch still burned onto her skin as she heads out into the main room.

There are two oversized backpacks resting beside the front door, a small crowd clustered on the edge of the sitting room where Gendry sits on the back of a sofa while Arya and Dacey chat animatedly, while Sansa and Sandor nod emphatically as Robb gives them word from Tucson. Shireen slows her walk to a drift and a linger, smiles shyly when the eldest Stark sibling glances up and catches her eye.

“There she is,” Robb says with an affable smile, tossing a water bottle in the air before catching it and walking towards her for a one armed hug. “How are you? Everything been okay down here?”

“I’m okay, everything’s okay. I mean, you know there’re people down here looking for me, right?” she says, looking up at him.  _How similar and yet so different he is from Rickon,_ she thinks. As intense and all business but with an easier, unrumpled charm to him, a guileless way he carries himself, and then she feels bad. Rickon is compared to his old self enough as it is, and now she unfairly compares him to another man entirely.

“Yeah, well, one thing they don’t know is there are people here willing to look for  _them,_ ” he says with a steel edge to his voice. “Isn’t that right, brother,” he says with a lift of his eyes over Shireen’s head.

“Damn right.”

She spins around, her back to Robb’s chest as Rickon walks in the room, jeans and a baseball t-shirt, and she’s reminded of how much she loves it when men walk around in their bare feet. Her first instinct, one that has entwined itself in others like breathing, eating and sleeping, is to step into him, but then  _This isn’t rocket science_  slither-slaps its way around her, and she recoils, bumps back into Robb before giving him a flustered apology, and she follows Sansa and Gendry into the kitchen where they intend to devein and peel shrimp before Sandor lights the grill.

It bodes unwell to her, how it’s all rocky water here before they’ve even laid eyes on the boat, and she is quiet as she cleans shrimp under the drizzle of tap water in the sink, Gendry and Sansa bickering back and forth about the perfect doneness of shellfish as they slice bell peppers and onion _._ She keeps her head down and her fingers busy until she feels the bump of a shoulder against hers that gives her a heady rush of hope.

“Hey,” Arya says, and Shireen’s hopes fall like rain when it isn’t Rickon. “Hey, put those fuckers down, I’ve got more important stuff for you to learn.”

“Oh yeah?” Shireen says, injecting little lies in her tone as she rinses and dries her hands, turning with a smile to see Arya standing in the middle of the kitchen.

“Yeah,” she says. “If we’re going to this boat or whatever, then there’s a chance we could be followed. Mance is a big wig here in Rocky Point, but that doesn’t mean he’s the only one. We have to be self-sufficient, and I think you need to learn how to arm yourself, or at least be more comfortable around guns,” she says, and when she saunters out of the kitchen, Shireen sees she’s got one of those little holsters tucked into the waistband of her jeans.

They head back to her bedroom, passing Sandor and Rickon where the two of them sit on opposite chairs from one another, the coffee table an island of dark wood between their cocked out knees.

“I saw your face, man, you can’t tell me it was just nothing, last night. Two people dancing to old fogey music doesn’t usually jar a Ranger like that,” Sandor says, graveled voice dropped low, his eyes an upward flick and fasten onto Shireen’s as she passes them by.

“I’m not a fucking Ranger, anymore,” Rickon hisses, stopping when Shireen passes his chair and he can see her. “Hey, honey,” he says on the inhale, trying to shake off his conversation with Sandor.

“Everything okay?” she asks lightly, as much a test as anything, and she thinks  _Come on, Ric, come on, crack open and tell me_ something _, tell me anything,_ but then her heart drops.

“No, I mean, yeah, everything’s fine, I just- Sandor and Sansa spooked me last night, that’s all,” he says, and his eyes are red-rimmed and full of clouds. “It was nothing, really.”

“Bullshit,” Sandor coughs into his fist.

“Whatever, you guys, we’re busy,” Arya says, walking back to where Shireen hesitates, and she grabs her by the wrist and leads her out of the room and down the hallway.

“Now,” she says, dropping her hand as she deftly pulls the gun out of the holster, and Arya spins on her heel as she turns to face her. “There’s no way I can get you hitting targets from 25 yards in an afternoon, especially since there’s no way in hell we’re doing any shooting in Mexico. But I  _can_  at least get you more comfortable about them. You flinch like a nervous cat whenever these are so much as mentioned, and we gotta iron that out of you.”

And eventually she does, with patience that belies her usual hot-start bursts of energy and movement. They sit tailor style on the bed and she takes the gun apart for Shireen, shows her where the clip goes and how to clear the action, laughs when Shireen’s first question is about the safety, one of the few words about guns she knows.

“Right here,” she says, turning the handgun –  _A 9mm, she said_  – on its side to show the little lever that toggles up and down, up and down, life and death, shoot or don’t, blood or none.

“First and most important lesson is to never,  _ever_  point a gun at someone, even if it’s unloaded, unless you intend to shoot that person, okay? No waving it around, no using it as a prop, nada. This is a lethal weapon and it should be treated like one. It’s not a toy.”

“Yeah, that’s- that’s not really making me feel easy about them.”

Arya shrugs. “It’s a lethal weapon, but it’s also just a tool. It won’t go off by itself, it doesn’t have a mind of its own, it’s not going to jump down from the table and run after you. Fear the person holding it, not the gun itself.”

After she demonstrates a few times Arya insists Shireen load the weapon, and she does so, aiming it at the outside wall of the room after they stand so her stance can be graded and perfected. She’s feeling equal parts scared and heart-pound proud when Arya praises her for holding her arms correctly, with tension but unlocked elbows, leaning forward instead of leaning back.

“Calamity Jane in the house,” a voice says behind her,  _his voice,_ she thinks because it’s all Rickon, and she lowers the gun, pointing it dutifully to the floor as she turns to look at him. He is wistful, heavy-eyed, chagrined as he leans against the doorframe. “I hoped I could be the one to show you around those things, but I can see Arya did a good job. Nice stance you got there, Trouble,” he says, his eyes a drift down to her feet and back up again.

It’s been an hour, it’s been a single fight, it’s been a night of bad dreams, and yet she stands here missing him, stands here feeling like even though she could stretch out her hand and brush his arm, he’s still too far away.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, watching his gaze do a runaround over all the corners of her, feeling the sweep of heat that always rises to her skin when he looks at her.

“Are you here to add in your two cents or just give your girlfriend elevator eyes?” Arya says, snapping them both out of it, and they both turn to stare at the first person walking the earth to ever refer to her as Rickon Stark’s girlfriend. “What? What, do I have a booger or something?” she says, wiping her nose with the back of her hand before she looks down at it.

“No,” he says, exhaling a huff of laughter as he shakes his head and pushes off the jamb. “Fajitas are ready, and you know how Sansa gets when you come late to her table.”

“I’ve roomed with her since college. I more than know it, I live in fear of it,” Arya says with a grin, lightly taking the handgun from Shireen’s grasp, double checking the chamber before she reloads it and slides it under her pillow. “No sex stuff on the bed, you guys,” she says over her shoulder, all hip shake exaggeration as she minces out of the room between them, and Rickon rolls his eyes as he turns to watch her leave.

“I’m sorry,” he says the moment Arya disappears down the hall, and he turns back to her, steps into the room and into her. “I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that shit. I’m just- fuck. I’m just sorry, is all.”

“I know,” she murmurs, looking up when he bows his head, runs the backs of his fingers up her arms.  _I love you, you idiot,_  she wants to say. She wonders if he’d say  _I know_ , if he’d say  _I love you,_ if he’d just say  _I’m sorry_ again. “You have to let me in, Rickon. You can’t keep me outside like a stray dog forever,” she says.

“You’re in,” he says with a startled look on his face. “Believe me, honey, you’re in.”

“No, I’m not, and saying it doesn’t make it true,” she says, placing both her hands on his chest, one a flat palm, the other a fist that knocks above his heart. “You have to let me in there instead of locking shit away. You hide from me, and I’m in- I’m in all the way, okay? So, you know, stop hiding.”

“I thought we didn’t pry into each other.”

“We don’t hold back, either, Rickon. You saved my life. I pulled you out of a nightmare. We don’t pussyfoot around each other, and after everything that’s happened, after—after everything, please don’t hold yourself away from me.”

He frowns and swallows, either searching for words or buying time, and finally he shakes his head. The sun has burned through the cloud cover, and it’s bright sparkling light, club soda and lemon that streams through Arya and Gendry’s single bedroom window. His expression is better suited for the fuzzed out grey of earlier, it is so contrasted here with all the merry.

“There’s too much of- there’s not enough- Shireen, there’s so much,” he says, his shoulders slumping as he lowers his forehead to hers.

“When your sister says food’s ready, it’s fucking ready,” Sandor booms from the other room, and once again Rickon and Shireen both jump at the interruption.

“The only thing that matters, honey, is that I’m here to catch it all and carry it, okay? You aren’t alone anymore, Rickon, so stop acting like it,” she says, her hands sliding off his chest as she pushes past him to heed Sandor’s beck and call, but then Rickon snares her by the arm and drags her back to him, chest to chest.

“I’m in all the way, too,” he says before he kisses her, hard and intentional, rough with need, and it’s not enough but it’s a start, and so she unlocks herself and throws away the key, her arms a wind around his neck when he locks his around her waist.

They’re finishing up a late lunch of spicy shrimp and hot corn tortillas, onions and peppers grilled in a foil packet that’s mostly empty by the time Jon and Tormund come knocking. Shireen has to wonder if he somehow  _knows_  when a meal is finished and it’s time to arrive. The chaos amplifies with the additional company, plus another friend of Tormund’s, a fox-faced man named Orell whose grasp of the English language is about what Shireen’s is on the Spanish.

“Robb, my man,” Jon grins as he walks around the sitting area to the table in the back where they’re all sitting, his arms outstretched as Robb walks with that not-a-limp towards his friend.

“Brother,” Robb laughs, and it’s wrist-grabbing handshakes and bro-hugs and back-thumping as the two longtime friends greet each other. “How’s life on the border, buddy? I haven’t seen you since we both told college to fuck off,” he says.

“Jesus, what a rough night,” Jon says with a shake of his head. “I knew my boy would always have my back when he broke a guy’s nose after he shoved me down a flight of stairs.”

“Some house party, huh?” Robb says. “Come on in, have some food so it doesn’t go to waste,” he says, and there is the adding chairs to the table, the hustle and bustle of heaping leftovers onto plates.

“ _¿Mal con su cara?_ ” Orell asks around a mouthful of fajita, index finger looping a circle around his face as he looks up at Tormund.

Tormund and Jon stiffen and Dacey and Rickon fling their napkins down on their plates while the rest of them glance around in confusion.

“ _Callate tu boca,_ ” Rickon spits out. “That’s my fucking girlfriend you’re talking about,” he says, much to Shireen’s fleeting delight.

Tormund hisses through his teeth before he shakes his head and chuckles. “ _Señor_  Attitude speaks  _Español_ _,_ watch out,” Tormund says, and this is news to Shireen, who blinks at Rickon.

“What, what’s wrong, Rickon?” she asks, tugging on the elbow-length sleeve of his shirt, but it takes several pulls before he unpins his glare from Orell to turn and look at her. “What did he say?”

“Nothing, baby, don’t worry about it. This fucker here has no manners,” he says, and at that Sandor throws his head back and laughs.

They choose cars for those going, Tormund, Orell and Jon together in his dusty Jeep, Robb and Arya, Rickon and Shireen in Sandor’s oversized tank of a Tahoe, though Robb insists everyone on Team Shireen, as he calls it with a grin and a wink her way, suit up in body armor.

“Don’t you think that’s a little extreme?” Arya says, hands on her hips as she looks up at her brother.

“Why don’t you ask the two who were already shot at,” Robb says, nodding to where Rickon and Shireen stand, side by side and hip-touch close near the door. Arya winces and nods, raises her eyebrows and grimaces at Gendry as she heads back to their room where the hockey bag of Kevlar is.

“You look pretty cute, all suited up,” Rickon murmurs as he sits on their bed in front of her, tugging and tugging on the straps at her sides, first the left and then the right, over and over until she feels like she’s laced up into a second skin, a turtle in her shell.

“I feel like a tub,” she says with a small squirm that makes him chuckle.

“A tiny little tub of cute, maybe. No, no,” he says when she tries to pull the dog tags out from between her breasts, and he stays her hand with the gentle press of his own. “Only douches wear their tags outside their shirts,” he says with a small grin as he hands her the loose blouse she chose to fit over the vest. He says it with an attempt at lightness that doesn’t quite meet his eyes.

“Well, I’d hate to be the douche bag of the group,” she says, trying for funny too, but instead she has the leap up of him, so sudden she staggers back a step or two.

“You stick behind me, all right? I don’t care if you’re wrapped up like a mummy in this shit, you stay fucking behind me. I don’t- you just find whatever it is you’re looking for, and you stay behind me,” he says, his hands two repetitive sweeps along her shoulders and down her arms, over and over as if he’s dusting her off, polishing her up. It’s then that she realizes his hands are shaking.

“Are you okay, Rickon? Please,  _please_  just tell me what’s going on. Did you have another panic attack last night?”

He stands in front of her, his own vest adding bulk to the mass of him that is starting to look more and more like this wall of hers that he talks about, and hesitation chases reluctance across his expression as he looks down at her vest, adjusting it under her arms.

“Not a panic attack, no. It was a- uh, it was just a memory, is all,” he says finally, and the pressure building up inside her is an immediate dissipation at his words, a scatter to the ether because finally, it’s  _something._

“Do you want to hold off on this, maybe? You seem- well, I just wonder if we should wait a day or two,” she says, tucking her forefingers into the front pockets of his jeans. Anything for a link to him, anything for a reach out and tether, a connection today when they seem to be drifting alone and apart.

Rickon shakes his head. “No way. We better do this now before we give those bastards any more time to track you or the boat. It’s gotta be today, and it should be now. Just- please, baby, promise me to stay behind me?” It is _pleading_ , low timbre pleading of the worst kind, because she hears pain and fear that he won’t recognize, preferring instead to seal it off, brick by brick. _All it takes is one good earthquake._

“I promise you,” she says, anything to take that thorn out of his paw, and she closes her eyes when he tugs her in close, a hand behind her head, another pressed to the middle of her back. “Just promise me you’re okay,” she says, and she feels like crying when his only response is a kiss pressed to her forehead.

 

The herding-cat quality of getting everyone out of the house and into vehicles is a grate on Rickon’s nerves, and they shred and fray as he stands outside sweating in his vest while Robb and Jon bend their heads together, as Sandor assures Arya he’ll keep a close watch on the house and everyone in it. The distant crash of waves is a low static nonstop hum, and it adds to the claustrophobic buildup of still air and humidity here beneath the low press of thick clouds overhead.

Sandor hands the keys over to Rickon, clapping a hand on his shoulder, his palm a heavy weight over the strap of his Kevlar. He steps in close, tall body a shield of privacy as he presents the others with his broad back. 

“Tell me now, where your head’s at, man,” Sandor says, eyes a don’t-bullshit-me grey here with the slate sky above, the washed out beige of the dirt road beneath their feet.

Rickon hesitates, reels himself in and takes an inventory of the things going on inside. Shireen is there, black hair and bare legs, a smile he wraps around his heart whenever he closes his eyes. Jon and Orell and Tormund are there too, all standing on a hill of distrust, and there is a car full of faceless men somewhere with Shireen’s name carved into their bullets. There is also a short history of failure. There is also a short history of losing his cool under pressure. There are dead friends he carries with him everywhere.

“It’s where it always is,” he says finally.

“Then get it in the fucking game, or sit this one out and send me,” Sandor says, jaw muscles working as he struggles to maintain his temper, and it’s then that Rickon realizes his friend is losing his patience with him.

“Hey,” he says with a shake of his head, stepping into Sandor’s space to rest a hand on his shoulder, like they are in a two person huddle on a field. “I’m fine with this. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep her safe, all right? The game? I never leave it, Sandor. My head is _always_ in the game.”

“Something else for me to worry about then,” Sandor says, giving Rickon’s trapezius muscle a squeeze before he nods and lets go, stepping back to where Sansa, Gendry, and Dacey stand. “Keep yourself safe too, man,” he says, holding up his two fingers like the muzzle of a gun, tapping his temple with his fingertips.

The drive is a quiet one, a brief spurt of urban streets before they empty out onto a barren stretch of dirt, heading west through the sandy desert towards the point of Cholla Bay that juts westward into the Cortez. A glance in the rearview shows his older brother grinning and texting from the backseat, his youngest sister gazing out at the hot blaze of moonscape with her hand riding the wind as she sticks it out the open window. Every time he looks at Shireen, however, her gaze is on him, a flicker across his face, down to his lap at one point when she finally reaches over and snares his hand, dragging it off his thigh and onto her own.

“It’s at a place called JJ’s Cantina, Davos said,” Shireen finally says once they’re back on residential streets, her voice washed over with the breezes whipping into the car through the open windows.

“That old gringo bar? I didn’t realize they had a marina,” Robb says from the back. Another glance shows Rickon he’s put his phone away, and he and Arya sit side by side, checking their pieces before tucking them back out of sight.

 The sun is low on the horizon, a fat lazy peach dangling just out of the sea’s reach by the time they pull up to the Cantina and the short docks that splay like splinted fingers out into the shallow bay. It’s as lifeless here as Mance’s was a couple of days ago, though the regulars sitting at the indoor bar are far more weather stripped and sun beaten, here with their Parrothead sunhats and Grateful Dead t-shirts. The seven of them cut through the restaurant, and Jon waves at the buxom, freckled bartender, her messy hair piled up on her head with a visor stuck in it like an ornament.

“ _llámame si alguien se presenta_ ,” Jon says to Orell and Tormund, and Rickon’s Spanish is just good enough to understand he’s putting them on watch. Jon points and waves and the two Mexican men nod and stand stock still on the steps between JJ’s and the boats. 

Two by two like Noah’s ark they walk down the long stone stairway towards the closest dock, and they split off in two groups to check the slips of each dock. Stannis’s keys are a jingle in Shireen’s hand as they walk up and down, reading names on sterns, typical things like _Bird of_ _Paradise_ or _The_ _Margarita_ , but nothing so distinct as _Storm’s End_.

Finally there is a low whistle, short and then long, from the farthest dock away from the stairway.

“Found it,” Jon says, his quiet voice a stretch and bounce off the water, and though it’s mellow and mostly still out here in the thick heavy heat, the sound of him makes Shireen jump and cling to Rickon’s arm.

“I can’t stop shaking,” Shireen whispers once they turn around and head towards Jon, and Rickon steps around her so he can slip his left hand into her right, so he can hold her close and still have his right hand free for defense.

“You’ll be all right. We’re just going to pop in and out. I’ll be with you the whole time, all right?”

Jon’s standing with his arms folded over his chest, a baseball hat pulled low over his eyes as he nods his head towards the slip to his right. Sure enough, a white and blue sailboat, well over 30’ long, rocks to and fro on the lazy bob of the bay, _Storm’s End_ written in block letters on the stern. There is no whimsy, there, and tonight Rickon can appreciate it.

“You two go on, we’ll keep watch up here,” Arya says, and he has to wonder, how long and how closely his siblings have worked together, the way Rob immediately takes up watch facing the restaurant while Arya presses her back to his, weapon drawn and yet still concealed behind Robb’s bulk.

Rickon leans forward, grabbing hold of the cord that acts as a sort of fence around the aft of the sloop, dragging it closer to the dock so Shireen can board, and once he hears the squeak of her sneaker tread on the fiberglass, he hauls himself up and over. The clink and clatter of keys echoes in his ears as she searches through the four or five keys for the one that will unlock the hatch.

“Shit, I didn’t think it would be so dark in here,” she whispers once they lower themselves down inside, the boat a tip and list and tilt, gentle like a rocking chair once they stand on two feet inside.

If Rickon thought standing around in August in Mexico wearing body armor was hot, it is nothing compared to this. The boat has closed up for months, and it’s dank and rank, the smell of old seawater and the creatures that call it home, the smell of must and dust and everything in between. And it’s _hot¸_ unlike anything Rickon has experienced until he remembers with a jolt and tremor. _Tanks,_ he thinks with static in his head and sweat sliding down his back beneath his vest. It’s another time machine, here in the dark. He is relieved when Shireen pulls up the flashlight app on her phone, when that blanching light chases away some of the demons.

“Can I have your phone too?” she asks, and he is a distracted glance up through the hatch door to the patch of reddening sky up and above them while Shireen pokes and peers around.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” he says, sliding his phone from his pocket and handing it over to her.

“Oh my _God,_ ” she says once she aims two beams of light around the salon, and it’s breathless enough to pull his attention. “Oh my God, it’s so _like_ him,” she says, soft like terrycloth, faraway and wistful.

The place is neat as a pin, as a soldier’s barracks with the bunk beds tucked in tight, with the little dinette table set up like a desk. It takes him right back to that night in Stannis’s office, a place for everything and everything in its place, and when Shireen sits down with reverential delight he smiles. _I almost kissed her that night,_ he thinks, watching with a sort of love-full amusement as she holds the two phones like playing cards in her left hand, their lights shining on the table as she riffles through the neat stacks of papers.

“No _doubt_ ,” she says, eyes widening as she pulls out a manila folder from the bottom of the stack. Even in this humid, stale air, black with no electricity, dusty from lack of use, Rickon can read the upside down lettering on the folder that reads EVIDENCE. “Rickon. Ric, oh my God,” she says as she flips it open, and despite himself he moves to stand beside her, looking over her shoulder as she sifts through photo after photo of two women in – _What would my mother call it? In flagrante delicto,_ he thinks, looking up and away when the proof of Mel and Cersei’s affair get more and more definitive.

“Jesus Christ,” he mutters.

“I cannot fucking _believe_ it, that woman having the nerve to bitch me out downtown when it’s been _her_ the entire time,” she says, shaking her head before tucking the photos back into the folder.

“The will, honey. Find the will,” he says, returning his attention to the open hatch. Rickon trains his ears forward, pretending he’s a dog like Shaggy as he tries to discern if there’s any activity above deck, but it’s hard to hear much through the fuzz in his head.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” Shireen says, and as the minutes pass and the red of the sky darkens to a bruised purple his heartrate jacks higher and higher. Rickon can hear the pulse rush in his ears, feels the throb of it in his heat-swollen neck as he sweats and waits.

“If it’s not here, it’s not here,” he says, gentle as he can with everything jangling inside him like a dozen alarms, and he clenches his jaw when Shireen makes a stubborn sound of resistance.

“Oh yes it is,” she says a few moments later, standing up from the little table with a Flash drive in one hand and another manila folder in the other. Predictably, the folder reads WILL – REVISED, 2015.

“No shit,” Rickon says, momentarily snared by her stroke of luck, and he inclines his head when she tucks the USB in her pocket and opens the folder. “Read it, quick now,” he says.

“Yes,” she exhales, out of breath and panting now, her heart likely beating as fast as his does now. “Oh my God, yes, this is it, this is it. I did it, I fucking _did_ it,” she says. Rickon’s ears prick when a cell phone rings, and he rolls his eyes, thinking of Robb and his nonstop texting.

“Well then let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says. “Grab the pictures too,” he says, grabbing his phone and pocketing it when she hands it back, and he’s first on the ladder-like steps, up and out of this black hole, this rock-a-bye tomb of suspicion and broken marriage.

“Thanks,” Shireen says when he bends down to give her a hand.

“ _¿Qué coño estás haciendo?_ ”Jon says, and Rickon looks up and behind him in time to see Orell come sprinting down the dock, pistol whipping Snow so hard the man collapses to his knees. 

“What the _fuck,_ ” Robb says, and now there’s gunfire to make Shireen scream his name, a direct hit that makes Rickon’s brother double over and his sister duck and twist to find her aim.

“ _¿Dónde está el soldado?_ ”Orell snarls, taking advantage of Robb’s recovery time to stride down the dock towards _Storm’s End,_ and he laughs when Arya’s shot gets buried in the hull of another boat. 

It’s that old familiar slowdown of time when their gazes lock on one another. The tick is when he lets go of Shireen’s hand, her fingers sliding through the sweat of his palm as he watches Orell lift his hand, as the bloom of a fired gun sears white in his vision before he feels the bone jarring impact of a bullet slam into his back.

Rickon grunts and nearly falls back down the hatch, catching himself with his left hand, teeth gritted so tight he thinks they might shatter. Shireen screams again and again, knives through his skull, through the wool of _Stark- that’s an  - Stark – that’s an order – son, get back here – all units report_ that is all wrapped around his brain.

The tock is when he pulls his weapon and stands, the center of his back a ground zero of pain, probably purple like the sky now, hot and buzzing like the feedback static in his head. 

“Get out, get out, get out, get the _fuck out, NOW,_ ” he shouts as he fires three times, two to the chest and one to the head, a technique he’s perfected, a technique he could perform in his sleep. He screams when the enemy falls to the dock, because this time he’s made it before the explosion, because this time his friends have made it out alive, because this time he will take these motherfuckers down before they can kill the people he loves. 


	17. Chapter 17

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/129292279088/a-world-alone-chapter-17)
> 
> [Playlist now!!](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/129313471718/a-world-alone-playlist-ch-1-prayer-in-c)

It’s a small little marina, but the flat surface of the bay and the close quarters of the boats around him have joined forces; when that bullet fires into his chest, Robb’s ears ring so brutally he can hardly hear anything save for the jarring sounds of chaos. His own knees hitting the dock, groans of pain, screaming, screaming, screaming. This is new for him. This scenario is what he has been trained to avoid for half his life, and his failure and his pulse threaten to carry him over into a bog of panic. But he pulls himself together, clenches his jaws so hard it hurts his teeth, squeezes his hands into fists, one against the dock and the other around his gun, and he staggers to his feet.

The bullet’s impact on the chest piece of his Kevlar has already shock-waved through him, the kind of ricochet slap that steals the breath right out of a man, but that doesn’t mean he’s at 100% when he stands and takes quick assessment. It’s a knockout blur on the edges of his vision, the way ripples hit a pond, and Robb gives himself one good, hard blink before he raises his weapon.

It’s an ugly sight, a long lifeless stretch of sunbaked sand between the docks and the Cantina up above, wet sand the color of cement. _It looks like you could crack a skull on that shit,_ he thinks before he remembers there is already a dead body on the dock, Jon standing over it with his piece drawn. _My brother killed that man,_ and that is a wild thought that threatens to steal Robb’s attention until his friend speaks.

“U.S. Border Patrol, raise your hands where I can see them,” Jon snarls to people Robb can’t see, and if his hackles weren’t already up, they would be now to hear such words.

Half his face is bloody from the butt of Orell’s gun, and despite the impact and the rivers of bright red staining his shirt, Jon Snow holds his own, even when one of those balding nobodies comes running towards him. Robb is closer to the end of the dock than he is land, tucked between listing hulls that block his view, so he hears him before he sees him, the rapid slap of shoes on concrete and then on wood.

“Fuck you, asshole,” the newcomer shouts as he fires at Jon, who twists and ducks, shaking a spatter of blood to the ground before he straightens. He takes him out with one quick shot, hollower than the pop of a champagne cork and far less festive. It’s a single shot to the chest that fells the guy like a tree.

His body is a dull slap on the wooden dock, the kind of sound that makes you think twice, and so the second man approaches with his hands up, weapon held in his right while his left is splayed wide like he wants his palm read. Two more men jog in after, coming to a nearly comical halt in a single file line behind him, and _It looks like a fucking Ralph Lauren ad,_ Robb thinks with a wild, derailed train of thought. He wonders if he should shoot one of them, if that is a solution or just another problem. And suddenly the feeling of being on a floating dock strikes him as all too fitting; they are in a foreign country with illegal weapons, standing on unsure ground in the middle of uncertainty, and it’s a sick twist in his gut when he realizes all the lines they’ve just crossed today. _Baby brother, what did you do?_

“You stop right there or you’re all fucking dead,” Jon says, hocking up and spitting a wad of blood onto the dock between the two bodies. He nods down the length of the dock towards him and Arya, grimaces with blood stained teeth, and whether he knows it or not it’s a terrible sight, with that wild look in his eyes.

The three men freeze when they see that Jon is not alone and that he means business, standing as he is like a tiger over the carcass of an animal, that they are three for three here on the ground. Arya takes a single step from behind Robb, standing so close to him it’s like she’s his shadow, and he feels the sleek eel slide of her arm against his as she lifts her arm, drawing up her cocked gun. His heart pounds. His chest aches. Time slows down. _Three for three._

Robb sends a quick prayer to any god that will listen that Rickon and Shireen somehow go unnoticed, that his brother has gotten ahold of his wits and has retreated back inside the boat. He is too scared to take his eyes off their new guests to confirm.

“We can take it easy, man, it’s no big deal,” the one in the royal blue shirt says. He is thin and reedy with the face of a weasel, sharp eyes and a smile that comes too easy under such a circumstance. He keeps his gun in his hand as he raises both of them to the sky, shrugs as he slowly takes his finger off the trigger. “I’ve got a lot of money on me, and I am more than happy to split it with you, so long as you give us whatever it is on that boat, and send that little bitch with us.”

“Fuck you,” someone says from above and to his left, and it takes him a few seconds to realize that dangerous voice belongs to his brother. Now that Ric has _everyone’s_ attention, Robb risks a quick glance to see Rickon standing in _Storm’s End’s_ cockpitwith his weapon still drawn. His forearms and face shine with sweat, and it lends that fury-twisted expression an extra tinge of madness, not that it needs any help in that department.

“Please, Ric, get back in here,” Shireen hisses, halfway out of the hatch as she grabs onto Rickon’s shirt and tries to tug him back. _Yes, go with her, listen to her,_ Robb thinks as he turns back to the men who are all looking a little hungrier, a little leaner now that they have set their sights on Shireen.

“There she is,” says the one in a turquoise shirt.

“Here, kitty, kitty,” grins the other in purple, and instinctively Robb cringes. He makes smoochy, whispery clucks of his tongue against his teeth like he’s beckoning a cat, takes a single step towards them.

Somehow Robb knows what sort of doom for them this means, and he looks left in time to see Rickon take hold of a winch and launch himself out of the cockpit and onto the narrow deck of _Storm’s End._ The sloop pitches dramatically when Rickon grabs the guardrail and vaults clean over it, off the boat and onto the narrow plank between the slips. Shireen lets out a shriek as the violent rock of the boat from his dismount sends her falling to her knees, though it’s not pain that rides her voice but his brother’s name.

“Jesus, he’s going to get himself killed,” Arya whispers against Robb’s sleeve.

“Or all of us,” he mutters.

“I will shoot your fucking brains out if you even _look_ at her, motherfucker, let alone talk to her,” Rickon shouts, and yeah it’s off season and there aren’t many people around, but this commotion here has still attracted onlookers, and JJ’s bartender gasps so loudly Robb can hear her all the way up on the Cantina patio. _Shit._

“Oh fuck, here we go,” Robb says.

The weasel faced man, still playing the innocent role of surrender even as his cronies act up, immediately lowers his hands and points his weapon at Rickon.  Shireen screams, and a hasty glance shows him that at least she has the sense to duck down out of sight. It takes a split second for Robb to act, but it’s enough time for a volley of gunfire between the Ralph Laurens and Rickon, who mercifully has enough of his wits about him to duck for cover between _Storm’s End_ and the neighboring boat when the bullets come his way.

Robb remembers a time when Sansa’s birthday cake almost fell off the counter, and at 12 years old, he felt like a hero for the first time as he caught it just before it fell to the floor. It’s a big brother feeling, a round, fat feeling that swells up in the very center of a person, knowing you’ve helped, knowing you’ve saved, knowing you’ve protected. It’s why it’s so easy to aim and fire, to shoot while he runs towards the small cluster of them, because that’s his brother they’re shooting at.

 

Arya spits out _Goddammit_ before she follows her older brother, screams for Shireen to stay put before a bullet grazes her shoulder and leaves behind a wound so painful the only word for it is _bright._

Jon immediately bull rushes the guy in blue, the one who lowered his hands and took the first shot at Rickon. He ducks his head as he runs and slams his shoulder into the guy’s stomach, and they go down together, Jon rising onto his knees as he punches him over and over again. Arya wants to fire but there’s that fucking bartender standing up there with two customers now, and any shot she might take has a risk of hitting anyone downrange. But it’s clearly not a concern of her brother’s, not from his inferior vantage point between the two sailboats, and Rickon fires again, two more times that narrowly miss their targets but make them duck just the same. That is when Robb is able to return Orell’s favor and pistol-whip the pervy guy in purple, to send him to his knees before adrenaline pulls him back up to his feet.

The two guys – _Hitmen? Kidnappers? –_ abandon their unlucky friend as they flee past where Jon is flipping him onto his stomach. The run one after another in bright happy summer colors as they pound their way up to the ramp, and suddenly all she can think is _They were going to kill us. They were going to fucking kill us over keys to a stupid boat,_ and now that the hail of bullets has stopped she is less scared than she is infuriated. Arya pushes past her brother to give chase, because she’s a wolf that had meat in her teeth before it was yanked away, and she will be damned if she doesn’t get hers.

It’s the macabre version of a playground game when she has to do a sort of hopscotch skip and leap over not one but two bodies before she rounds the corner to follow them back up the ramp and to dry land. She can just make them out, taking the stairs by twos and even threes as they turn tail, and she staggers to a stop as she watches them shove past the bartender, pushing her so hard she falls back into the small throng of bystanders. _Fuck,_ Arya thinks, hands on her hips, gun in her hand as she bows her head to catch her breath, lowers her eyes to the ground.

“Jesus _Christ,_ ” she says with the sharp suck of a gasp, because Jon’s friend, huge musclebound Tormund is in a heap at the bottom of the stone stairs, propped up on an elbow and holding his bleeding head in his big paw of a hand. “You scared me half to death, you big bastard,” she says, trying to ignore how her voice shakes, how her hands and limbs tremble from the fear and thrill of it all.

“Juan,” he grunts, looking up at her with one eye swollen shut, and she has to admire his tenacity. Tormund clearly took more than the single blow that Orell gave Jon, and yet here he is, rolling onto his hands and knees so he can stagger to his feet. More blood on the ground. “ _¿Dónde_ _-_ eh, where is Jaun? Orell, he uh, he hit me,” he says when he finally straightens and towers over her.

“Yeah, he really fucked everything up, didn’t he,” Arya mutters, tilting her head to look around Tormund and up the hill towards the parking lot. As confident as she can be that they’re gone, she finally holsters her weapon and sighs, rubbing her face with her hands. “Come on, Jon’s still got one of those other cocksuckers if you want to kick somebody. Christ knows I do,” she says.

“That don’t sound so bad,” Tormund says with wet chuckling _heh_ , his accent making his words lilt, the obvious trauma of his attack making them sound like gravel at the same time.

The burble of rapid conversation becomes clearer as they hurry back towards the farthest dock where everything happened, where everything went wrong, where two people died. For an unhappy moment, she wonders what color the water runs, below the gap-toothed planks of wood. She gingerly touches the wound on her shoulder, a bullet-dug trench into her skin and muscle, and she thinks she knows.

Jon is zip-tying the weasel faced guy’s hands together at the base of his spine, ignoring how the press of his knee into his shoulder blades keeps the guy’s face shoved hard to the dock. Arya hopes he gets splinters. With a final tight tug on the zip-tie, Jon stands and drags him up to his feet, running through a laundry list of offenses he will be getting charged with.

“Those are bullshit, I don’t have anything, man, except the gun you stole from me. I didn’t smuggle any drugs across the border,” spits the cuffed man.

“You do now,” Jon says, and he’s as weary as he is angry when he reaches in his back pocket and pulls out a Ziploc baggie of white powder. Jon shoves it into the pocket of his khaki shorts, cuffs the guy when he tries to spit in his face. Arya nods with eyebrow-raised approval.

“Gilly!” Jon shouts up towards the Cantina, hand cupped around his mouth, and the bartender up above waves her arm down at them. “Gilly, call Grenn!” and then she disappears back into the bar.

“Here’s your friend,” Arya says flatly, glancing from Jon to Tormund as she walks past the scene.

That’s all the attention she can spare them, now, because Rickon is standing there trying to tug off his shirt one handed, and there is a scary moment when it gets caught around the gun still clenched in his hand and the thing waves around, pointing any which way. Robb is talking to him in quiet undertones as Shireen tries to pick her way out of the boat, and Arya jogs over to hold the sloop steady and pull it closer to the edge of the slip like Rickon did earlier so Shireen can climb down.

“I’m just so fucking hot,” Rickon says, wiping his forehead with the back of his right hand, and Robb jerks his head out of the way when the muzzle of Rickon’s gun moves across his field of vision. “I can’t catch my breath, man,” he says.

“Is he okay?” Shireen whispers, fear coloring the edges of her words. She is still clinging to Arya’s hand with both of hers, and Arya wonders how much she saw, wonders if she’s looking at Rickon in a different light now.

“I don’t know. I mean, he just, I don’t know,” Arya says slowly as they stand a few feet away, watching Rickon shakily unstrap himself from his Kevlar vest. She and Shireen both suck in identical gasps when the thing falls to the dock at his feet, and they see the vicious bloom of dark purple and red where he was struck. It has already spread so much that it covers his spine, and Arya thinks of Bran and his wheelchair when she thanks the universe for body armor.

“How did I get out of the boat? Where’s Shireen, is she- Jesus,” he says, voice collapsing into a whisper as he looks past Robb and sees Jon Snow speaking rapid fire Spanish into his phone as he paces the dock, both he and Tormund wiping the blood from their faces with the hems of their shirts.

“So you uh, you don’t remember how you got out of the boat, man?” Robb says, and the three of them follow as Rickon pushes past him, hand still clamped on his .45 as he steps fully out from between the boats and sees the full scene.

It’s two dead bodies and two pools of red, red, red. It’s one man half trussed on his knees like he’s about to be executed instead of arrested, his head bowed in defeat and probably from the pressure of trying to think his way out of this. It’s the smell of loosened bowels and stale fishy bay water. It’s death, there, in the frozen angry expression on Orell’s face, in the sagging way the other man’s head lolls against the dock, his cheek stained red from the widening puddle of his own blood. It’s why Rickon has started to hyperventilate.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck, what happened, what _happened_ ,” he says, and he sounds so lost Arya’s heart breaks, because he still doesn’t know the half of it, clearly. Rickon tries to bury his face in his hands as he staggers back from the whole mess, but then he’s pushing the grip of his .45 against his face, and that startles him so much he jumps like a cat.

“Whoa, no, no, no, I- what’s going on,” he says, staring down at the weapon in his hand.

“I don’t know, man, you just, you shot him out of nowhere,” Robb says, but then Shireen lets go of Arya’s hand, runs and pushes past him on her way to Rickon’s side. “Three times just like that, faster than I shoot once.”

“Shut _up_ , Robb, now is not the time,” Shireen hisses with a glare his way, and she must know more than they do, because she’s right, and now after everything, Arya has to watch her baby brother lose his mind.

“ _I_ did this? _I_ did this?” he repeats, words coming out in shallow pants, and even from ten feet away Arya can see the heaving way his ribs expand as he tries and fails to catch a full breath.

“I got one of them, Rickon, it wasn’t just you,” Jon says from the sidelines, but his words fall on deaf ears.

“Shaggydog, I need Shaggy, I- Shir, where did you- oh God, no, not again, not again, not again,” he says, stumbling to his knees and the knuckles of his right hand that still grips the gun. “Not again _, fuck,_ ” he says, shoving the gun so hard away from him it skates across the wooden planks and falls with a _ploop_ into the murky water below.

“Rickon, _please_. I’m here, honey, I’m here,” Shireen cries, sinking to her bare knees beside him, crawling over to put her arm around his bowed shoulders.

Arya has tears in her eyes as she and Robb creep closer to the scene, and she wants to get down and offer her brother comfort too, but it’s too late, because he’s already passed out cold with his head in Shireen’s lap.

Tears fall, blood drips down, and the world has turned itself into a nightmare.

 

He’s never been one for the theatre but even Jon can see the similarities between this clusterfuck and some Shakespearian play, with blood everywhere and a woman crying by the motionless side of her lover’s. This is no time for sentimentality and dramatics, however, not with this fucking mess he’s got to clean up, and so he is forced to be clipped and clinically cold after he gets off the phone with Val.

“Mance and Grenn should be on their way now. You know Gilly, she’ll tell everyone it was a BP issue,” he says in Spanish to Tormund, who nods, watches as Jon squats down to search through Orell’s pockets. He leaves his .38 where it fell for the time being.

Luckily the guy only had a piece of shit gun, all plastic covering, nothing he or Mance have ever distributed, nothing that can be traced back. _Nothing that could have sent me to the hospital_ ,he thinks bitterly as he wipes clean another Ziploc bag of cocaine and stuffs it in the wad of peso notes Orell had before shoving it all back in his pocket.

“I get a phone call,” says Shireen’s would-be hitman, Rickon’s would-be killer from where he rests on his knees between Orell and his friend. _Maybe not friend,_ Jon thinks dryly, because he hasn’t spared so much as a glance to his accomplice’s body.

“You’re not arrested yet, dick, so you don’t get shit,” Jon sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose with the cleaner of his bloodied hands. His head throbs from the injury received and the headache sliding into place from this mess.

“Look, I hate to be an asshole right now, but I have a world of shit to deal with at the moment,” he says when he stands, turning to where Robb, Arya and Shireen are trying to pull a groggily revived Rickon to his clumsy feet.

“Jesus, Jon, he’s just come to, for fuck’s sake,” Arya snaps from under one of Rickon’s arms. _Still fire and spit, after all these years,_ he thinks. It would amuse him if he didn’t have so much work to do.

“He’ll be coming to in a Mexican jail if you don’t get him the fuck out of here, now. And you, hey,” he says, snapping his fingers to a tear-streaked Shireen, snagging her attention with his aggression. Her eyes are full of worried love and they immediately remind him of Val, and he tries to soften his voice when he nods towards _Storm’s End._ “Did you get what you came here for? Did you lock that thing back up?”

“Yes,” she whispers, tapping the back pocket of her jeans from which several sheets of paper protrude, wrapping her arm back around Rickon’s bare torso as she looks over her shoulder at Jon.

“Good. Pick up his shirt and his Kevlar and high tail it the fuck out of here, all right? I’ll keep the Federales off your scent, but I can only do that if you get gone, _now._ Gilly’s already going to have to get those guys blackout drunk up there, and the longer you stay, the bigger the bill, and guess who’ll have to cover that tab,” he says.

“I’m so sorry, Jon,” Robb grunts as he bears the lion’s share of his brother’s weight as they start their hobble down the dock towards land. “I owe you one,” he says.

Jon shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it, brother. What’s family for, huh?” and he nods wearily, claps Robb lightly on the shoulder as the siblings help one another towards the stairs, Shireen hustling after them with her arms full of body armor.  

“Espero que usted no está demasiado cansado para ayudarme a limpiar esta mierda,” Jon says once they’re gone, once he and Tormund turn around in unison to stare at two dead bodies and one big fucking mess.

Tormund shrugs, steps forward to suck in a breath through his nose, cough, and spit bloody phlegm on Orell’s face.

“Nah,” he says.

 

Rickon lies on his side on the backseat of Sandor’s SUV, and Shireen holds his head in her lap the entire drive home, much like she did when he passed out at the marina, though this time he is not limp-limbed and lost. _No,_ she corrects, as she gazes down at him in the dark car, running her fingers through his outgrown hair. _He is_ still _lost,_ she thinks, because he’s got his arms wrapped tight around her like she’s a security blanket, has his face buried so snug against her belly she wonders how he can breathe. But he does, deep shuddering things that make him shiver despite the heat that encompasses the entire world out here.

Shireen runs a hand down his side, can feel the cold clamminess of his skin on her warm palm, and she’d turn around to grab his shirt from the back but the last time she twisted away from him he very nearly sent himself into another panic. And so she sits, murmuring soft things to him, quiet _Shhs_ and _It’s okay, I’ve got yous,_ runs her fingers through his hair as she tells him she loves him, as she tells him she will always love him, no matter what.

And it’s the truth. She’s never lied to him and she doesn’t intend to start, especially now after what happened. It’s a heart hammering memory, the sight of him standing and drawing his gun from her below-deck position. He looked all the taller from her position on the lowest rung of the hatch ladder, all the more frightening as pulled the trigger so quickly she doesn’t even know how many times he fired it. _Enough to wound_ , she knew. _Enough to kill,_ she found out later, when she finally emerged and saw the calamity, legs knocking together like it was a hurricane that ripped through instead of Rickon. _Enough to save my life again,_ she thought with a sort of savage determination as they walked up the stairs to JJ’s parking lot, as she watched Arya and Robb practically haul him the entire way. _My poor, poor, Rickon,_ she thinks, lifting her hand to tuck a sheaf of hair behind her ear before returning her attentions to him, fingers in his hairline, along his jaw, a thumb brushing against his cheekbone.

“Has Jon texted you?” Arya asks from the driver’s seat, her voice hushed like she’s in a church instead of a sandy old Chevy.

“Just once, to say they took the one guy in and cleaned up the bod-” Robb says before a pause and glance back to the glare Shireen has ready for him. “The uh, the dock. They cleaned up the dock and left,” he mutters, turning back to face the road.

“It’s okay, baby, I’ve got you,” Shireen murmurs as she bows her body over Rickon, because at his brother’s words his hands have turned to clenched fists.

“Who do you keep texting then?” Arya asks, slowing down to turn onto the dirt road that leads them in the sandy dunes of Las Conchas.

“Sansa. I’m just letting her know what she needs to tell dad, and that we’re all okay, aside from, you know. What happened. And that we’re going to need a quiet house,” Robb says, the underside of his face lit up with the glow from his phone.

“We need a quiet car, too,” Shireen says, teeth-sharp like a mother bear with a cub, like a woman with her arms full of broken love.

To their credit her demand is granted, and she’s grateful for it because now she can hear Rickon muttering unintelligibly against her blouse and the soft of her belly, filling her lap with sorrow and pain and guilt like a pool fills with water. The rest of the car is nothing but the sound of her shushing him and trying to calm him down.

“It’s okay, honey, I’m here. I’m here. I love you. I love you, Rickon, and you’re going to be okay, I promise.”

She’s worried it’s a hard promise to keep, though, once they pull up to Mrs. Celtigar’s and the front door is already opening with a bang loud enough to make Rickon jump and startle. _All that progress,_ she thinks sadly as Arya kills the ignition and the A/C dies. The interior of the car is instantly unbearable but she doesn’t budge, even when his siblings slowly open their doors and step out, even though her thighs stick to the seat and she expects his body does too, that it can’t be comfortable for him, shirtless as he is.

“Ric, honey? We’re home,” she whispers, cradling his head with one arm behind it, the fingers of that hand in his hair, and she holds him to her despite trying to coax him to sit up.

She doesn’t expect him to move, is surprised when he finally lifts his head and unwinds one arm from around her hips. Rickon mops his face with the open palm of his hand, speaks to the dark of the car.

“Are we alone?” he asks with marble-mouthed mumble that sounds far away and small, like he is a little boy who fell asleep on a road trip and has woken up from bad dreams.

“Yeah,” she says, lifting her gaze from him only to discern if the affirmative needs any amendment. She can see Sansa and Gendry linger in the doorway after Robb and Arya disappear inside, but then Sandor’s shadowy figure looms up in the doorway, and soon they are all gone and the door closes. “Yeah, we’re alone, honey,” she repeats, looking back down at him.

He gazes up at her as he rests his head back in her lap, still curled up on his side with his knees tucked against the back of the seat, and from the faint light that seeps in from the light of the front porch, she can see the flex and bob of his working jaw muscles. Finally he speaks.

“You’re um. You’re telling me you love me, and I’m having a really hard time believing it right now,” he says. “After, after everything. How? I just, fuck. Shireen, no,” he says, swallowing and closing his eyes. Despite his words he slides his arm back around her, turns his head to bury his face into her blouse again.

“I’m telling you I love you because we don’t hold back. Because it’s true. Because I’m in love with you and I need you to know it. And because right now, you _really_ need to hear it.”

“I killed somebody,” he says, his voice humming against her skin as his mouth moves against her belly. “I am a murderer.”

“If you hadn’t he could have killed _you._ I mean, he shot you. I watched you nearly fall when you got hit,” she says, wondering how her life has spilled into this new vessel that rationalizes murder, this new Shireen shape that has for some reason conditioned itself to accept a backdrop of gunfire as just another evening. She wonders when it will go back normal. And then she wonders _If._ “And your brother, too, I heard him tell Arya. He could have killed Robb, Rickon. Some people would call you a hero,” and the moment she says that word she closes her eyes a moment because she knows him, knows it’s the wrong thing to say right now.

Her thighs jiggle as he shakes his head violently, because those answers aren’t good enough, because he’s not buying it. She sighs, quiet as she can, gazes down at the shadow-on-shadow of him, runs the backs of her knuckles against his cheek, the only plane of his face lit up with the porch light.

“He could have killed _me_ , Rickon,” she murmurs, running her hands from the hairline on his forehead, all the way back to the nape of his neck. At _those_ words he stills, or at least he stops shaking his head. “If he’d gotten to me, I am positive he would have killed me, or- or he would have-”

“ _No_ ,” he says, voice tight like the clench of his jaws, like the sudden squeeze of his arms around her. “No, not on my watch,” he whispers.

Shireen smiles, and it’s an odd bubble of a smile, filled as it is with sorrow for him, with happiness to hear such a fierce declaration.

His hair is damp on the back of his neck from the hot car, though he doesn’t seem to notice, and when she runs her touch down between his shoulder blades she can feel his skin is slick. She remembers him overheating, his hyperventilation and the subsequent panic attack, and getting him into the A/C becomes a priority.

“We should get out of the car and into the house, honey. It’s too hot in here and I think you need to drink some water.”

“I can’t- Shireen, I can’t handle this anymore,” he says, sitting up despite the despair in his voice. Rickon sits on the seat facing the car door with his back to her, arms linked around his bent knees. “It’s too much, I think I’m going to go out of my mind. I think I might have already.  I mean, fuck. I blacked out with a gun in my hand,” he whispers, bowing his head.

 “It’s time you stop carrying it alone, then, so we can work on all of this together,” she says, frowning at the contusion on his back, how the bruise looks black in such weak light. “You’re bursting at the seams, Rickon,” she whispers, leaning into him to kiss his back, to rest her cheek against the sweat of him. “Let me carry some of it. Let me carry you.”

 _Please let me carry you,_ she thinks and she prays, because she knows full well what some people will do when they’re at the end of their tether, all chewed up and hopeless. _Please let me love you longer than this._

The car is quiet.

“Okay,” he says finally. “But I don’t- I don’t know how to do that, anymore. I’ll try, but I just, I just don’t know.” His voice cracks, and she understands that this is the sound of Rickon about to cry.

“Oh, yes, you do,” she says. And it would be so lovely to have heard him say it first, to have heard him say it at all, but now is not the time to force him on a stage to make a declaration. So she says it for him, because there is no doubt now, even for her. “You do know how, because you love me, Rickon. You love me, so you’re going to let me help you,” she says firmly, sliding her arms around him, grasping her own wrists and squeezing him to capture him in love, to snare him in devotion.

“Yes,” he says, as he lets go of a long held breath, his shoulders slumping and his arms letting go of his knees so he can wrap them around hers, and she hopes he feels the hug he’s giving back to himself here. “Yes, I love you. I love you,” he says, rocking back into her ever just so. “I’ve loved you for a long time, I think.”

She has seen pyrotechnic shows and that is how it feels to hear him say those words; it feels as if someone has  blown a love-struck breath of kerosene on the dead wick of her heart, and now it flares into a living lick of flame. It helps light the way out of this dark hot car, out of this lethal black desert, and she remembers what will help him, this man she loves, the man who loves her back. She inhales deeply, hangs onto it a moment as if the exhale could blow out that new flicker in her heart, but she has more faith than that, and so she lets loose her sigh.

“Come on, honey. Let’s go get you in the shower.”

 

He follows her like a stray dog, a hollowed and scooped out shell of a man as they get out of the car. They leave both of their vests and his shirt in the back of the SUV, and Shireen takes him by the hand when they walk through the front door. The warm yellow and orange light inside makes him wince, turn his head away from the several sources here in the front room, here where Gendry and Sansa leap to their feet when they cross the room towards their little hall at the end of the house.

“Ric, wait,” Sansa says as they pass by.

“Let him go,” Sandor says in his low steady way, and Rickon is grateful beyond words, since he has none for them anyways.

The lights are too bright, and they will find him out in here, leech in to all the black parts of him that hold monsters and ghosts, and he steps closer to Shireen at the idea of everyone getting a glimpse. The A/C is a sudden shock of cold, and by the time they make it into their bedroom – _the good room, the one without the nightmares –_ he is shivering, and even the slightest shudder makes his back ache from where he was his. _No,_ he thinks, closing his eyes at the jagged way his memories reframe themselves. Shireen in the boat – daylight – gunshot – stagger – stand and – now on the dock and breathless – blood all over the – _No,_ he screams inside his head.

“Rickon?” she says, and he blinks at her, is back in the cheerful little room they share, the light far less invasive, far more comforting since it’s only coming from the little nightstand. “Come on,” Shireen says, mouth shaped into a reassuring sort of curl that’s not quite a smile but that is beckoning just the same.

“Are you going to go back out there?” he asks as she leads him into the bathroom, opening the glass shower door to turn on the water and hold her hand beneath the stream.

“No. I’m coming in with you,” she says simply, nodding when the feel of the water is to her liking.  Shireen closes the door to keep the water from seeping out onto the tile floor and turns to him. “Now come here.”

He inclines his head with his eyes closed as she undresses him, kneeling down in front of him to help him with his shoes, and he’d protest if he didn’t need to grab hold of the wall to keep himself from falling over. She stands when he’s barefoot, and he can hear her kick off her sandals, hears the dainty girlish shoes scuff against the tile. When he opens his eyes he has the sight of her tossing her top onto the counter, and he wants to smile when he realizes she’s doing tit for tat, back and forth as they are each of them peeled down to nakedness. Rickon would help her, but there is immeasurable comfort here where he is being taken care of. For the first time in adult life, he accepts it.

“I love you,” he says when he’s naked and she’s shimmying out of her panties, when they’re dropped on the pile of their clothes like a cherry on a sundae. They’ve only been completely naked in front of each other once before, but it seems as good a time as any, maybe the best time, now when there’s nowhere left to hide anymore.

Shireen lifts her hands and cups his face, brushes her fingers against the shag of hair that’s starting to fall over his forehead.

“I love you too,” she says, and then she smiles. “I’ve loved you for a long time, I think.”

The water is warm when they step under it, when they change places back and forth under the showerhead, Shireen tipping her head back to wet her hair, and he follows the sluices of water with his hand. He half expects it to run with blood when the water hits his skin, but whenever he opens his eyes and stares down at the drain, it’s clear as rain, does nothing to wash away his past and all of its stains. He steps aside to let her back under the water, to watch her, to let his brain soak up _this_ sort of sight instead of all the others.

Rickon watches as she wraps a wet washcloth around the bar of soap, lathering it up until it foams like soap itself, and he closes his eyes when she rests it gently on his arm. It takes him a few moments before he realizes he is crying, and he is too tired to turn away from her anymore, and so he simply stands still for her as she scrubs him clean. He braces a hand against the tile, head resting on his own shoulder as she moves around him, squeezes soapy water on the back of his neck so it runs down his back. She uses both hands on his chest, one to follow the washcloth, then the other way round, and she says nothing, even when he sucks in a breath only to let it go with a heaving, cracking sob.

“All clean,” she murmurs when she’s done and he’s all rinsed off, but when she turns to put the washcloth beside the soap dish set into the wall, Rickon stays her hand. “Oh right, your face,” she says, but he shakes his head.

“You,” he says, leaning into her to grab the soap behind her. “Please,” he says with a deep sniff and sigh when she opens her mouth to protest.  “Please, Shireen,” he says.

He needs touch, he needs feel, he needs texture and context, he needs tactile things he can cling to, like the spongy squeeze of the soapy cloth in his hands, the way suds rise between his fingers when he presses it to her skin. He needs the sight of her when she tilts her head so it’s under the water, needs the trust in her when she closes her eyes as he washes her arms, her breasts and her stomach, when she turns in place like a dancer so he can wash her back. He needs something to do, and once he’s got it the tears eventually stop and the words eventually start.

“So many things went wrong that day,” he says, combing her hair with his fingers as he drags it off her back and drapes it over her collarbone. Rickon rests his hands and the washcloth briefly on her narrow shoulders, slides them down through the soap to her arms. _Let me carry you,_ she said.

“You mean today,” she murmurs, turning her face towards him though she keeps her eyes downcast, and he shakes his head, because here is his _Okay._

“ _That_ day,” he says, returning his gaze to the task at hand, to the soap and the water and the lovely flare of her hips under the scrub of washcloth. “I was supposed to be in the first vehicle behind the tank, with Wex and Osha and another buddy, Arik, but I got held up,” he says, and he tells her how he was sick as a dog, his guts upending themselves behind the barracks tent before he grabbed his helmet and jogged to the convoy line, stomach still sloshing.

It is a memory clear as day, Wex standing and hanging out of the first Humvee, grabbing his junk and saying _Suck it_ before ducking inside. Osha’s flipped finger stuck out the window before the truck sealed up and the engine started. It was his last image of them alive, crass and raucous and laughing. He would not have it any other way.

“Rickon,” Shireen murmurs, but he stops her when she tries to turn around to face him. One step at a time. He sweeps the washcloth across her twice-cleaned shoulder blades, peers up at the showerhead when the pressure dips and it’s little more than a drizzle.

“It was a standard convoy to check defense lines and the water supply of a few wells nearby. It was nothing special, nothing invasive, but we were uh, we were ambushed,” he says, and he tells her how the tank either missed it or the UVIED malfunctioned, but when the first truck’s right rear wheel hit the pressure mat, the thing went off and sent the Humvee flying onto its side.

He contemplates sparing details but before he can actively make that decision they come pouring out of him like blood, like gasoline leaking out onto the desert floor. Osha’s leg and the combined mess of Arik and Wex, black smoke and the sudden riot of gunfire. How the tank blocked the path and before Rickon’s driver could slam the brakes they drove right into the wreckage at 40mph. The skidding and the scream of metal, the kick-up of dust like it was its own special storm, how he couldn’t see a goddamn thing. It is why the leg in the road is such a clear and vivid memory, as if he took a photograph and framed it, hung it on his wall to stare at every sleepless night.

“I disobeyed orders,” he whispers, the rush of the shower replaced with the sound of his voice and the slow drizzle of water from the showerhead. His hands run down her wet hair, down her wet arms, down the curve and dip of her back, finally settling on her hips, his thumbs resting in those two delicious divots at the base of her spine. “I disobeyed orders and I got out of the truck, and I- why couldn’t I have blacked out then? Why do I have to remember,” he whispers down to his thumbs, and he is grateful when the water pressure leaps back to life and comes now in a loud gush.

“It wasn’t just an IED left there to do its damage, either. It was a trap. The enemy were shooting at us from the right,” he says, his eyes closing and his right hand lifting to gesture in that direction, and instead of cheerfully bright painted shower tile and the steady stream of water, Rickon sees soot colored smoke and orange dust, an oatmeal colored sky and the ghostly way human shapes emerged from the chaos. Faces swathed with cloth, clothing a mixture of black and camo, guns, guns, guns.

“I shot them all,” he says, his other hand leaving her now because this is when the other shoe drops. Rickon steadies himself with a hand gripping the top of the shower door, with the other pressed to the wall. “Six, seven of them, but I never got hit. Sometimes I think that was the other thing that went wrong, that I didn’t die with them.”

“Rickon, you can’t say that, please don’t sa—”

“They were kids, Shireen. I shot kids. I should have known if they couldn’t hit a solitary target. I shot- oh Jesus, Shir. Once it was all over, once the rest of the guys came out and pulled me back, once all the smoke cleared- they were only fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Kids,” he says, and he thinks for a second that he’s choking on smoke and the smell of blood once more, that he’s hacking up that morning’s breakfast all over again. But he is only choking on his tears, trying to breathe around his guilt, here in this tiled confessional, here where secrets and self-hated rise and billow like steam. He can still see their faces.

“I can still see their faces,” he grits out through a sob, and now when she turns to face him he does not stop her, because he hasn’t the strength to, anymore. Because there is nothing left, anymore.

“Come here,” she says, pulling his head down onto her shoulder, her chin lifting to accommodate the bulk of him when he bows his body and folds himself around her. “You didn’t know, Rickon. You didn’t know. Shhh, honey. I’ve got you, I’m here,” she says, more of those soothing things he wants to curl up and die in.

“Do you still love me?” he asks, sucking in a breath and tasting the clean of her, water on his mouth as he buries his face against her hair and her shoulder. Here’s the real fear he’s carried with him, because he’s a desperate man who is desperately in love, and the idea of dangling here alone and abandoned is an acute terror to pile on top of the others. “How can you still love me after that?”

“Of course I still love you,” she says, her hand a sweep down his hair to his neck and back again. “I will _always_ love you,” she says.

Because he’s all spilled out everywhere, because she’s standing in a puddle of him, all the mess and the roil, all the past and the self-loathing, because she is Shireen and she is telling him she loves him and she always tells the truth, he nods against her shoulder, closes his eyes and does as she tells him. Rickon lets it all out, and Rickon lets her carry him.

“Okay,” he says.


	18. Chapter 18

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/130072022373/a-world-alone-chapter-18)

He is sitting in the chair by the little desk at the far end of the room when she returns with two bottles of water, towel around his hips and head sagged against the back of the chair. Shireen pauses, rests her cheek against the door jamb as she gazes at him, as he covers his face with his hands, a boy playing hide and seek, a boy hiding from all the secrets he's let out. They came out of him in the shower and she let them slide down her, water off a duck’s back, big things to him and to her too, though Shireen has no internal struggle letting them circle the drain and disappear. They do not change things, for her, except maybe make her love him more, if only because he needs it. They are simply shadows and ghosts to push through, to slip past on her way to him, to the sweet gentle  _mellow_ inside him, so that’s what she does now on bare feet, wrapped in a towel with wet hair.

The room is quiet, silent actually, and soft around the edges, corners fuzzed out with shadows, the little nightstand lamp warming up the place with its melted butter light. Shireen breathes in and breathes out to let him know she’s here, a low little breath before she sets the waters down on the dresser. Rickon slides his hands down his face as he tips his head towards her, gives her a tired blink smile that is only strong enough to lift one corner of his mouth. They stood in the shower for nearly an hour, the water pressure a come and go, the heat a die down and start up as he cried, as she held him, as the only words left to say were  _I love you_  on slow, winding repeat.

“Hey,” he says, voice a dried out husk, scratchy from so much use, so much reveal and so much dig, and it strikes her that maybe that’s the most he’s ever said in one fell swoop, without interruption, since she’s known him.

“Hi,” she says, running her hands through his damp hair when she’s pushed aside the wraiths and the hauntings to stand at his side. Miniscule droplets of water scatter up at the movement, and she thinks of seeds being thrown to the earth, thinks of things growing instead of things dying.  _Let’s grow,_  she thinks.

Rickon loops his arm around the backs of her thighs, rests his head against her stomach, rubs his forehead against the towel like a cat asking for love, and that makes her smile because he doesn’t need to ask her for anything.

“Don’t go,” he murmurs when she takes a step back and then another one, moving to stand in front of his cocked out knees.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she smiles, hands lifting to untuck the corner of towel that’s wedged between her breasts, and she lets it drop, a slouch of white terrycloth on tile the color of butterscotch.

He inhales slowly, deeply as he rights his head to look at her, eyes a lock on hers before the gaze drifts down, down, down and up, and he sits up when she walks into him, her kneecaps bumping the hem of his towel where it stretches out between his legs. Rickon’s hands come up, land like fallen leaves on her hips.

“What are you doing, baby,” he murmurs, thumbs a press and knead against her bones.

“Loving you,” she says, bending down in a lean to pull on his towel, and it comes away, opens like a Christmas present, and she lets the two ends of it drop down to the floor. Her lean makes the dog tags swing forward, bumping him in the chin.

“Take those off,” he whispers, lifting his head to kiss her throat as she climbs over his thighs one at a time, and she shakes her head once she’s straddled him.

“No,” she says, straightening to look down at his upturned face, to cup it in the palms of her hands so he understands her. “They’re mine now, and so are you,” she says, sliding a hand down his chest, to fill it up with the hardness of him before she lowers herself onto his lap.

He’s a slow groan, a long and low shudder when she’s finally got the whole of him, a thick full feeling that makes her spine lengthen as she arches back and shifts her hips, finds that sweet deep thing that makes her want to buck. Shireen’s feet lift off the floor until it’s just her toes holding her to earth and then she bows forward over him, finds his mouth with hers so she can discover what love tastes like. His hands are a smooth ride up her thighs and sides, and they chase each other up her back where they reach her shoulders and pull her down and into him. It's then that he moves his hips, a long drawn out pull before the push, up and in until she gasps against his mouth.  

It’s achingly slow movements and needy hands, flat palms and curling fingers, the spread of her thighs when she wants more of him and the sigh of his breath when he pushes her body back to kiss her breasts. He sits for the rocking of her hips, for the wind of her arms around his shoulders, and he hums when she whispers his name. She doesn’t need to move much faster to get the sensations to stack themselves like firewood, building up so they can be burned down, and when the rush of her pulse and the way it feels to finally have him inside her make her breathless they also make her come.

Rickon brands her with kisses, licks to her collarbone and under her earlobe, slides his hand up into her hair so he can close his fingers around it and pull her down to him. Shireen rests her forearms on his shoulders, pushes down on him as she rises up, and his head drops back when she slides back into place, right down here where she belongs, keeping him inside her where he should be. His eyes roll back in his head before he closes them, before he lets out a groan and suddenly grips her hips and holds her down, and then she has the  _yesyesyes_ out of him, not in words but in the way he jerks, in the sudden warm slick slide of him as he reaches, reaches, reaches. Rickon lets go of a shaking breath.

She stays where she is, watches him with drowsy eyes as he lifts his head and meets her gaze. He raises a heavy hand from her hip to brush aside her bangs, watches his fingers as they drag a damp lock of her hair away from her scarred cheek and tuck it behind her ear.

“You have everything, now,” he says, eyes dropping to her mouth, and she hopes he registers how breathless he makes her. Shireen kisses him, tries to leave a sigh with the lick of her tongue so he can keep it forever.

“What’s that,” she says, running her knuckles against the sand-scratch of his scruff.

“All of me,” he says simply. “All of it, everything,” he says as he lifts his eyes to look at her, and though they’ve just made love and he is still inside her, it’s a shock and startle, the heat between them, the spark that’s usually reserved for love at first sight.

“Well I’m going to keep it,” she says, “all for me and nobody else,” she says, and her hungry girl greed makes him close his eyes and smile.

“That makes me happier than you’ll probably ever know,” he says quietly, sad boy smile and dropped gaze as his hand slides out of her damp hair, and he watches his fingers trace her collar bone.

“I make you happy, then? Even with everything like it is right now?” she asks, because oh, that’s all she wants right now, is to hear light, warm, good things, is to know she’s doing something right when all she’s ever really felt is _wrong_ her whole life.

“You’ve been making me happy basically since I met you,” he says, humming as he brings his head down to kiss her clavicle.

“ _That_ was happy out of you? All surly brooding silence and sarcasm?” Shireen says, and he huffs a low laugh.

“Okay, not happy, but you made me feel less alone. Sometimes it seemed like- the night I first met you, you said you didn’t have a home anymore. That made a lot of sense to me. That’s how I’ve been feeling since I got back and it was such a relief to meet someone who understood,” he says, hands an idle roam here and there, across her back down her arm, back in her hair. She thinks of his word, _Recon,_ and she recognizes it as his hands map her out, as they take her in and learn her.

“And now?”

“And now,” he says, lifting his head, letting a long kiss dry on her shoulder where he leaves it. He smiles at her. “Now, I think I’ve found one,” he murmurs.

“Oh, Rickon,” Shireen sighs, and she lifts her toes off the floor to hook her ankles around the back of the chair, to get as close as she can to him as she kisses him.

She tries to stand once he’s slipped free from her and they are no longer one animal, though he doesn’t want her to, clings to her like a child with a beloved toy. When she tells him she has to wash up he _Ahs_ and nods, wraps his arms around her, rocks forward and stands to walk them back to the bathroom. He sits her down on the counter like she weighs nothing, like she’s a precious doll set lightly back on its shelf or pedestal, kisses her so thoroughly she’s already got second thoughts about unwinding her legs from around him.

 “Hurry back,” he says, kissing her again, all these kisses, all this skin, all this love and need and pull and want. He is simultaneous hunter stride and animal walk when he heads back into the bedroom, and when he closes the door behind him she sighs to have the vision cut off.

He’s lying supine in bed, arms folded and hands clasped under his head when she’s all cleaned up and missing him already, and she is happy to discover that he is still naked beneath the sheet when she slides in next to him.

“Will you be able to sleep?” she asks, rolling onto her side so she can curl up against him, head on his chest, arm across his ribs, leg hitched up over his. He smells like soap. He feels like home.

“I don’t know,” he says, mouth against her hair as his arms unfold to come down around her. “I don’t even know if I want to. I’m scared of what I’ll see,” he whispers.

“I don’t want to fall asleep and leave you alone,” she whispers, gazing at her fingers as she sets them adrift in the tawny hair on his chest. She hears him smile.

“I won’t be alone, Trouble,” he says, turning his head away from hers as he stretches over and shuts off the light. “I’ll be right here holding on to you. Right here where I belong,” he says in the sudden blink of darkness.

 

The eventual evening and deepening of Shireen’s breath is a lullaby to him, and he’s an in and out doze for god knows how long, but the magic she’s worked on him holds fast, and his mind is an empty grey hum. And when the spell fissures and cracks he’s got the length of her arm to run a fingertip down, has that fruit-flower-cream smell of her hair to bury himself in, has the sleepy kitten grunt in the back of her throat when she turns in his arms. Ever since they left the marina she has taken care of him, has bathed him and dried him, has held him and loved him and made him hers. Here in the dark in their bed he focuses now on the fact that she is his, that maybe she might give him the rest of his life to make everything up to her. He wonders if she realizes that she probably saved his life in that shower. He wonders when he suddenly started thinking of it as something worth saving.

He thinks it was probably when she told him he was hers, when she gathered him up and simply took him in every sense of the word, and the last thing Rickon would ever do is try and take something away from her.  _Take it all,_  he thinks, kissing her shoulder blade as he curls up behind her, sliding his arm over that valley of waist between her hip and ribs. When his hand brushes against the mattress in front of her he feels the dog tags lying there.  _I miss you guys,_  he thinks, seeing Wex’s laughing fox face and Osha’s dark eyed grin.  _I miss you guys, and I wish you were still here,_  he thinks as he closes his fist around the tags, but he doesn’t wish he was with them, anymore, because he’s here, with Shireen, right where he belongs. It’s that thought to which he clings, along with his old tags, when he finally drifts off to sleep and the dream that seems to have been waiting for him.

They’re sitting at a café on 4th Avenue, though neither Wex nor Osha are from Tucson, and the sun is shining while a lazy patter of rain falls all around them, leaving big round spatters on the metal tabletop between their brightly colored coffee mugs. A street performer plays the viola two storefronts down, though to Rickon it sounds like piano.

 _I hear she’s pretty,_ Osha says, pushing a lock of short, uncombed hair behind her ear as she stirs her coffee.  _Not as pretty as me, but I’ve been out of your league since the day I was born._

 _Where’d you meet her,_  Wex asks, opening his mouth as he tips his head back to catch rain on his tongue.

 _In my house,_ Rickon says, wondering briefly why he isn’t wearing any clothes, but then again, Osha is wearing a field of flowers and Wex, he suddenly realizes, has the legs of a goat, so it doesn’t much matter.  _It’s like she was always there, waiting,_  he says.  _Like I’ve always known her, I guess._

 _Sounds like looooove,_ Osha says, and Wex laughs, almost falls out of his chair when a waitress walks by and waves at him.

 _It is,_  Rickon grins, sipping his coffee, and it tastes like flowers and fruit, and the cream that sits on top is berry pink and makes him think of sex.

 _Where is she?_ Wex says.  _I want to meet this girlfriend of yours. What’s her name?_

 _Honey,_  Rickon says, and then he laughs.  _I mean Shireen, her name is Shireen and it tastes like silk when I say it._

 _There she is now,_ Osha says, pointing up the sidewalk past the viola player. Shireen’s hair drifts all around her like she’s underwater, and the sidewalk seems to move with every sway of her hips. Rickon stands with a smile, and the light all around them suddenly flares golden like a sunrise.

 _She IS pretty,_  Wex says with a nod of approval, standing on his faun legs, and instead of tags he’s got a wooden flute hanging around his neck.

 _Tell her we said hey, sugar,_  Osha says, getting up to kiss Rickon on the cheek, and just like that the sidewalk and street are covered in flowers and green, green grass.

 _We’ll be seeing you around, man,_ Wex says, slinging an arm over Osha’s shoulder, and he tells some crude joke that Rickon can’t quite hear but makes him laugh with them just the same.

 _Hey baby,_  Shireen says, her blue dress turning white wherever the raindrops wet it.  _I hope you weren’t waiting long._

 _Nope,_ he says.  _They were just here but they’re gone, they wanted to meet you,_ he says, turning around in confusion. Shireen beams happily, crouching down to pick a wildflower, and she tucks it behind her ear when she stands.

 _I met them already, Rickon. I meet them every time I look at you._  She takes his hand.  _Want to dance? This is my favorite song._

When he wakes it isn’t with that jerking startle that so often whisks him out of sleep but with the simple opening of his eyes, and he realizes he’s crying again. He hasn’t cried this much since he watched E.T. with Bran when he was in middle school. The tears are so prolific he’s forced to let go of his tags, lift his hand and turn his face away from Shireen to wipe them away. Their voices were the same and so were their faces, all lit up and full of energy and life, and in that fleeting half-real state he felt the richness and warmth of their presence for the first time since they were taken away. It’s then that he realizes they’re not just sad tears but happy ones as well, because it has been so long since he dreamed sweet, has been so long since he’s spoken with them. He touches his cheek where Osha kissed him, smiles and wishes he could remember Wex’s joke.

“Are you okay? Ric?” Shireen asks, voice thick with sleep, and she twists around to look at him. “Was it a bad dream?”

 _They say hi, they like you, they wish they could meet you,_  he wants to say, but it wouldn’t make sense and she’d probably think he was going crazy, so he just shakes his head.

“No, no bad dreams,” he says, sniffing before placing a hand on her belly, because it was her favorite song and she wanted to dance but he woke up before they could, because they belong together and to each other and he needs to be closer to her now that the dream has left him.

Rickon pushes his hand down so she lies beside him on her back, rises up on his elbow, and he drops a kiss to her mouth, one and then two and three before she opens her mouth and lets him in. He’s got the slide of her tongue in his mouth when her arms reach up around him, when he moves up and over to settle himself above her. He’s got the smell of rain and sunshine, the lick of cream, warm grass under his feet, all of those things rolling around in his heart. What he  _really_  has, though, is her in his arms, and there is worship he’s falling behind on.

“What’re you doing,” she murmurs against his mouth, up to the ceiling when she tilts her head back and gasps as he slips his fingers inside her.

“Loving you back,” he says, because he’s been  _taking_  all night and now he wants to  _give_ , because he’s been nothing but a shattered man and he wants to put himself back together. Because he wants to be inside her. Because he wants her to be inside him.

“Yes, please,” she says, thighs an upward drag as she lifts her legs to wrap them around him, and she is a deep moan when he’s fully seated inside her. “Love me, Rickon,” she sighs when he draws his hips back and then forward, when he fills her up and has the soft warmth of her to dive into and drown in. He could come now from the slipslide of her, from the luxury of her words and the way she runs her nails down his back.

“I am,” he says against her mouth, against her throat, into the thicket of her star-black hair. “I do, I love you. I’m loving you,” he says, moving in time to the words so she can feel it, so she will know it. When he eventually gets her to come he identifies it as _his_ new favorite song, the way she says his name and how words like  _Yes_  and  _I love you_  rise up and out of her, landing all around him like warm rain when the sun shines. It’s all serves to sends him back to sleep not long afterwards, and this time there is nothing. No nightmare, no dream even, no Wex or Osha, only the wooly soft black of dreamless sleep, only the feel of Shireen as she holds his head on her chest and runs her fingers through his hair.

“You got a minute?” Robb says the next morning, after everyone sat texting and calling everyone else, trying to figure out the best plan of action.

It’s why Rickon is busy packing up with the rest of the house, because their new plan is to hightail it back to Tucson with Shireen’s findings before anyone tracks them down. He looks up at his brother from where he squats down by the cooler, trying to wedge everything in so the lid can still close. Robb is shirtless in a pair of cargo shorts and flip flops, has a nasty bruise on his chest several inches from his heart, and Rickon would wince in sympathy if his back didn’t throb whenever he moved. Robb gazes down with unreadable eyes, though the tone and the timing give Rickon more than enough hints as to what he wants to discuss, and that’s why he sighs when he stands up.

“Yeah, sure,” he says, sliding his lighter and half smoked pack of cigarettes off the counter, nodding towards the back porch where a few spatters of hot desert rain have painted the deck.

They sit across from one another at one of three concrete and tile tables, Robb setting his phone down before squinting out to sea with his arms folded just beneath his contusion, Rickon smoking in silence and staring at the spit of rain. He wasn’t there last night, even though he was, and despite scraping out and washing away all the rot of his past with Shireen, Rickon is apprehensive about what Robb will tell him. Shireen didn’t say much, when he eventually asked about it earlier that morning; _Orell hit Jon and shot Robb. You responded. It was very quick, I- I didn’t see,_ she said, and for that at least he’s grateful. But his brother was in the fray, his brother was right there when suddenly the dizzy spell broke and he was left standing there between two boats with a gun in his hand.

“I talked to Jon earlier,” Robb says to the surf line, unfolding one arm so he can scratch the back of his head. “He said Mance got a few buddies to go diving at the marina and they found that .45 he lent you. The one you dropped into the water,” Robb says, as if he needs _that_ memory jogged, as if he has borrowed dozens of handguns from Border Patrol agents.

“Good, glad to hear it,” he says tightly, looking at his cigarette before he slouches in his chair and takes a drag.

“It had your prints on it,” Robb says.

“Yep,” Rickon says, closing his eyes as he lets his head drop against the back of the patio chair, face tipped towards the sky as if he was getting a suntan and not a few drops of rain on him. His eyelids are ringed with the burn that comes from so many tears, and they burn, but he will not share that information.

“Which are probably filed with the military,” he says flatly.

“Yep.”

“Look, man, you want to play tough guy, that’s fine, but you fucked up last night, all right? We were supposed to work together, and then you just, you know, you went dark. Do you have _any_ idea how terrifying that was?” To his credit, Robb looks mortified by the time Rickon rights his head and opens his eyes to stare at his brother in disbelief. “Ric, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

“Yeah, Robb, I think I have an idea of how fucking terrifying it was,” Rickon says coldly. “I’m the asshole who blacked out and came to with a couple of dead bodies hanging around like lawn furniture.”

“I want you off the job,” Robb says quickly. “I talked to dad and he agrees, it’s not safe if you’re gonna—”

“ _Job_? You think this is a job for me now? Jesus,” Rickon says. “Bran’s said you can be obtuse sometimes, and I’m just now figuring what the fuck that even means.”

He shoves the chair back with a loud scrape to the cement as he stands, shielding his cigarette from the rain with his cupped hand. He smokes and paces as Robb sighs, as the rain falls hot and sparse and ineffectual, and he wishes it would just storm already, a good monsoon to rip through here.

“Look, I know you take this stuff seriously, that it’s your background and your, you know, your identity,” Robb says, and Rickon turns to stare at the back of his head in time to see his brother lift his hands in the air with exasperation.

“This isn’t my identity, all right? I’m working on getting my identity _back,_ for fuck’s sake, I’m trying to- I’m in love with her, all right? It’s like you and Dace, okay? You think your being fucked up would stop you from being there for her? You’d crawl on _two_ broken legs to get her out of harm’s way, don’t try to tell me that’s not true,” Rickon says.

Robb pushes his chair back and to the side so he can better see him, twisting his torso in his seat to look at Rickon with no small amount of surprise, and when he asks if Rickon really is, he nods. _Longer than I’ve realized,_ he says, and unlike all the other stuff, this is something of a relief to admit.

“Do you uh, do you think that’s why you blacked out yesterday? Because of how you feel for her?” he says. There’s a sliver of hope in Robb’s fathomless eyes.

Rickon winces as he looks up at the grey sea, normally a deep mottle of green and blue but today a perfect reflection of the sky. The rain is a hiss around them, just like his cigarette when he takes another drag.

“No, that wasn’t it,” he says finally. “That was Iraq, last night,” Rickon says, dropping his gaze as he bows his head and comes back to sit at the table. He rests an elbow on the concrete, takes the last few drags of his smoke before dropping it to the ground and grinding it out with his heel.

“I wish you’d just tell us, Ric. We’re all so worried about you, but you just bottle everything up. I talked to dad for over an hour and a half last night, and I doubt the man slept a wink after we hung up.”

Robb is a pleading gaze and a scoot forward to rest his forearms on the table, all big brother concern and desperation to understand. He thought he’d never want to talk about it again, after stripping himself bare for Shireen, but there’s a certain strength he can find there now, one he never had before.

_Do you still love me? How can you still love me after that?_

_Of course I love you. I will always love you._

_Okay._

“Okay,” Rickon says. “Give me that, will you,” he nods as he holds out his hand for Robb’s black iPhone, and he swipes at the screen to unlock it, to search through his brother’s contacts until he finds his parents’ contact info. “No, stay, man,” he says when Robb halfway gets to his feet. “I want you to hear this too,” he says with a sigh, sitting back into a slouch as the phone starts to ring.

 

“I swear it’s them,” Shireen says with a wide eyed shake of her head from the back seat as she cranes her head to look at the cars behind them.

They are twenty minutes away from the border on that long stretch of pin-straight highway cutting through moonscape, where even with a clearing sky above them everything has a washed out, bleached bone sort of quality to it. Sandor is a silent presence behind the wheel, though when Shireen finally turns forward she sees him watching her in the rearview. She swallows thickly and nods to him, trying to keep the fear down.

“How many cars back?” Rickon asks as he returns the weight of his arm to her shoulders, feigned nonchalance as he lifts a lock of her hair between his thumb and forefinger.

“Two. Robb and Dacey are still behind us, but the other guys are behind _them,_ ” she says. “They’ve been back there since we passed the Supermercado,” she says.

“I’m texting Arya now,” Sansa says, long hair hiding her face as she inclines her head towards her phone. “They’ve just gotten to Lukeville now, she says they’ll tell Jon or one of his buddies if he’s not there. Maybe he can help us out again,” she says as she glances up and Sandor, back to Rickon and Shireen.

They had a powwow earlier that day when Rickon was talking with Robb outside, and Sandor listened in as Shireen explained very quickly what happened at the marina, not just with Rickon but with Jon’s sly drug cover up as well. Arya and Robb had been clipped phrases and shorter tempers, all crackle-twitch and inability to verbalize much, and so Sandor and Sansa had been left largely in the dark until Sansa finally sought Shir out for any sort of details. _It’s to do with what happened in Iraq,_ Shireen said haltingly, her eyes flicking up to Sandor’s grey burn gaze, to the working of his jaws beneath his scruff and scars. _Tell us, please,_ Sansa had said, but Sandor had shaken his head and left the room with his arms folded across his chest, and Shireen had to tell her that it wasn’t her secret to share, that Rickon would have to be the one.

He hasn’t said much though, since he and Robb came in from the back patio, his big brother’s arm slung over his shoulders, their heads bent together as Robb said something against his ear in low tones. Ric simply nodded, clapped his brother on his back and drifted off to get their bags from the back bedroom. _I told them,_ he said after slamming shut Sandor’s hatch, turning to her with red rimmed eyes. _I told them everything._

“You still have the Storm’s End stuff, right,” he says now, close by and low, a presence that comforts her the same time it inspires her to comfort.

“Yes,” she says, feeling the flash drive in the pocket of her shorts, pinching it to be sure. “And the papers are in my purse,” she says, nudging the leather bag on the raised hump between the footwells.

“Good. Good,” he says. “But don’t make any more emails or phone calls to Davos. We’ll need to bring them straight to him when we get back in town,” he says, turning his face to hers so he can kiss her temple.

“We don’t have anywhere safe to go, though,” she says, thinking of her sad, sweet little guesthouse that’s been ransacked and shot at, a tiny little whitewashed square surrounded with oleander and bougainvillea, all bright happy colors that now just make her think of blood on bone. “They could have followed me anywhere, they’ll know wherever we go.”

“We’re staying with my folks,” Sansa soothes from the front seat, glancing back with a reassuring smile. “We’ll stay with them and then get Davos the new will and then she won’t have any more reason to come after you; if she does, we’ll start tailing _her_ and mounting evidence against her. We’ve got the proof now, so it’s all over. Even if Mel doesn’t realize it,” Sansa says, and her voice is so warm, like sweet tea and milk, like honey on toast, that Shireen can almost believe it.

There’s still a good fifteen minute wait once they roll to a stop at the border, and she chews her fingernails and hunkers down against Rickon’s side, trying and failing not to turn her head and glance behind them every ten seconds.

“We’re almost there, honey,” Rickon says after the fifth time she’s looked back, and when she gazes at him he smiles, and it’s not quite happy but not quite sad either, and he nods towards the front of the car where she can see they have one more car to wait.

“Good afternoon, folks,” Jon Snow says once they pull into place and are waved to come to a stop, and he rests his folded forearms on Sandor’s open window as he gazes inside. “I take it we’re all US citizens in here,” he says, and he’s all bored and easy body language as he gazes around, until he locks eyes with Shireen. There must be fear in her face, because he frowns. “What’s going on?”

“The guys from JJ’S Cantina are behind Robb and Dacey,” Rickon says, lifting a hand to point over his shoulder. “Two cars down,” he says.

“Are they now,” Jon says, standing up straight to take off his baseball hat and scratch under his head as he gazes south to the offending vehicle. “Well, I’d hate to think they were in the same stuff their buddy was into. And I would feel real bad, knowing I let them back over without at least, you know,” he says, trailing off a moment, lost in thought and perhaps memory, and it only takes the brief closing of her eyes for Shireen to recall Jon cuffing the one guy and planting drugs on him.

He clears his throat before rapping his knuckles on the outside of Sandor’s door. “Anyways, folks, have a pleasant drive back,” he says, looking into the car a final time as he makes eye contact with everyone. Rickon is the last, and they gaze at each other a moment, neither man offering challenge or accusation. “Be safe out there, you hear?”

“Yeah, we will,” Rickon says.

They are a slow roll from Mexico to the United States, back on the familiar turf of Arizona with an SUV full of borrowed guns that Jon will come retrieve in a week. Mexico is supposed to be the more lawless and wild of the two, at least according to the stories, but Shireen feels fear far more acutely now that she is on the same side of the border as Mel. It helps, though, when everyone in the car save for Sandor turns in their seats to try and see past Robb’s car, when Shireen goes so far as roll down the window and stick her upper body out to look behind them. Because between the whip of her hair in the wind and the heat that digs into her like the sting of a sandstorm, she can see Jon Snow haul out first one and then the second guy from the vehicle Shireen has been watching so closely. Before they take a bend in the road, the last thing she sees is a small cluster of Border Patrol agents surround them, and though she is nowhere close to what she’d describe as a vindictive person, there is a deep, thick knot of grim satisfaction when she sits back down next to Rickon. _I hope they’re scared to death,_ she thinks. _I hope they're as scared as I’ve been._

“Now let’s go home,” Rickon says when she’s back under his arm, when she rests her head against him, and Shireen nods, pulling his dog tags out from under her shirt so she can clutch them in her fist.

“I already am,” she says.


	19. Chapter 19

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/131192995888/a-world-alone-chapter-19)

“I’m sorry that took so long,” Rickon says once his parents’ front door closes behind them, and he sighs when he drapes his arm over her shoulders to pull her closer.  If she crawled inside his skin he thinks it wouldn’t be close enough, not after everything they’ve gone through, not after everything they’ve given to one another.

“You just told them everything that’s happened to you, Ric,” she says with a head tilt against him as their steps crunch through the gravel driveway towards his truck Jojen dropped off when they texted that they were back in town. It’s still and quiet save for a distant rumble of thunder, mercifully so after that intense powwow with his entire family. “That sort of thing _needs_ to take a long time. Are you okay? How was it?”

It was exhausting and he tells her so, how he swore to his mom and dad that he’d see EB tomorrow or at the very least put in a call. He tells her how he felt lighter and cleaner when he told her naked and sobbing, but how this time it was all heavy fatigue and dread, like laying someone’s run-over pet on their doorstep.

“Which is weird,” he says as he opens the passenger side door and holds it open, as she smiles with that mixture of sorrow and love and happiness that has become their personal brand of love.

“Why is it so weird?” she asks once he’s behind the wheel, her fingers busy unwrapping a piece of gum for him. He can’t help but grin as he leans it to nip it out of her grasp.

“Because you’re the one person I didn’t want to scare away,” he says with a mouthful of spearmint. Rickon braces his hand against her headrest as he puts in the truck in reverse, and he glances at her before looking over his shoulder as he backs out into the street. “You’re the one person I wanted to hide all that shit from, but you were the one who made it better somehow.”

“That’s not weird, honey, that’s just being loved,” she says, and he smiles at the clouded, sunset-soaked road when he moves his hand from the gear shift and finds hers waiting on the seat between them.

“I guess it’s doing the loving part, too,” he murmurs, lacing his fingers with hers, marveling at how new a sensation it is, how natural it is too. He only wishes he wasn’t such a shaken up shell of himself now that he has a woman to stand up with, now that he has things like honesty and comfort, has the sweet curve of her smile whenever he takes his eyes off the road to look at her.

She tells him where Davos’s office is downtown, and he can’t help but notice that she checks her purse over and over again, is all flit and fidget like she was a few weeks ago when they broke into Stannis’s office. Rickon waits for a red light before he turns towards her, pulling his hand free to tuck her hair behind her ear, to run his knuckles down the scrape of her scars.

“Are _you_ okay? I’ve been such a fuckin’ diva these days, making it all about me,” he says, trying for flippant with a roll of his eyes, because it’s easier to joke about it than admit the toll his weaknesses have taken on him. “You’ve been through the ringer, Trouble. You holding up okay?”

“I’m ready to not be in a car, anymore,” she says with a weak chuckle, tit for tat and joke for joke. “No, but really, I’m okay. As okay as I can be considering everything. I know it’s going to be over, though, and that’s what’s keeping me going right now. I just- I hate being in the in-between. I wish we could just, ugh, teleport there or something. The waiting is killing me,” she sighs.

“Soon, baby,” he says, and he widens his eyes and nods encouragingly as the light turns green. “Even sooner, now,” he says as he drives them through the intersection, and he’s a worn out smile when she laughs. “Maybe after all of this bullshit is over and done with you and I can take a real vacation. Not whatever it was we just went on. I can take you out to San Diego.”

“I think I’d love that,” Shireen says. “After everything I think some serious downtime is necessary. What would we do? Learn to surf?”

“We’ll do nothing. We’ll _sleep_. Fuck, I think I could sleep for a hundred years,” he says, rubbing his hand down his face as if to wipe away the fatigue. “We’ll stay at the Del on Coronado. It’s real ritzy for fancy girls like you,” he says, and he’s got the memory of a silk nightie, wonders what it would look like on her, or better yet tossed in the corner of a hotel room. “Although it’s another road trip, unless we scrape together some money for airfare.”

“Well, you know, after all this bullshit is over and done with, I’m um, I’m going to be pretty well off,” she says with the bow of her head, shy girl polite in her black sundress as she takes his hand in hers and rests it in her lap like it’s something precious. “I’m going to be _rich,_ ” she says, looking up at him all mingle-tangled hopeful and insecure, as if she’s just told him something horrible.

Rickon almost has to laugh; he’s known the entire time this has all been about money, and logically he knew it had to be a _shitload_ of money to warrant break ins and drive-bys. But she’s never thrown it around, never acted like those snobby sorority girls that never gave him the time of day in bars downtown, when they’d ask what House he lived in and he’d snort and say _I live in an apartment._ And now here he is, deep-dark in love with a rich girl. In the end he does chuckle with a shake of his head.

“What, like first class ticket to California rich?” Rickon asks with a grin, deftly shifting the truck with his left hand before he darts it back to the steering wheel, all to keep his right hand safe and sound between the snare of hers, where she traces imaginary patterns across his tendons and down to his wrist.

“More like first class tickets to Paris rich,” she says. “And then to Rome, Madrid, Timbuktu. We could go anywhere we wanted.”

“I’d miss Shaggydog too much to go to Timbuktu,” he says, laughing when she rolls her eyes.

“We wouldn’t _live_ in Timbuktu, for Pete’s sake. But suit yourself, honey, we’ll take Shaggy with us, wherever we go.”

“Holy shit,” he says slowly. “So that makes you _dog_ rides first class rich? I had no idea,” he says, flicking on his turn signal when she points out Davos’s office.

“I’m glad you didn’t, or else I’d think you’re just sleeping with me for the money,” and just like that he’s back in Mexico with Shireen above him, trapped in the scent of her shampoo as she lowered down and made him hers. He suppresses a shudder of delight.

“Impossible,” Rickon says as he pulls off the main road and onto the narrow avenue Davos’s parking lot empties out onto. “But man, do I know how to pick ‘em,” and he laughs when she drops his hand to slap him on the arm.

 _This is us,_ he thinks, and even though there’s a stain of sadness that will always be around, there’s happy stuff too, the way her eyes warm up when she looks at him, the way everything feels okay, now, because she’s next to him. _This is us, and we’re going to be okay._

She feels like a can of soda that’s been shaken up and opened, all fizzy roar in her stomach and chest where her heart is a woodpecker ratatatat, because she can see Davos’s car parked in the shade of a late blooming acacia. _He’s here, he’s here, oh god_ she thinks when Rickon parks next to his Lincoln, and they sit a moment in silence before he turns the key and kills the engine.

“Ready? It’s all going to be over in about thirty seconds,” he says, rugged handsome adorable when his eyes crinkle, when he smiles at her the way she’s been praying for since she was a little girl. “And then you’re going to whisk me to Timbuktu. First class, remember,” he says, and Shireen chuckles, pressing her hand to her stomach to get the butterflies and fizzle to calm down.

“I’m ready. Let’s get this to him. The second I watch him email the files down to probate, I’ll feel better. I’m _so_ ready to feel better,” she says, and once more she checks the location of the flash drive, mindful of Arya’s parting gift before Rickon came outside.

 _Soon it’s going to be naps in high thread count sheets,_ she thinks as she opens the car door and steps outside, the muggy heaviness of the air mingling with the cherry red bloom of sunlight hovering above the Tucson Mountains to the west. Clouds gather like old friends above her and she hopes for rain, a good clean rain for a good clean start.

“Is it locked?” Rickon asks as they cross the small parking lot towards the glass doors, and Shireen shakes her head.

“It shouldn’t be, even though it’s past office hours. He’s waiting for us, he knows we’re coming,” she says, but as Rickon reaches out to grab the knob he freezes.

“Is he supposed to be alone?” he asks with a frown. “Because there’s someone else in there,” he replies when she tells him _Yes._

“Oh my god, no,” she whispers when she comes to stand beside him, when she sees that familiar splash of dyed red hair, the familiar sway of hips when her stepmom rounds the corner out of Davos’s office.

“We need to get the fuck out of here, I’m not- I’m unarmed, Shir. My dad made sure of it before I left,” Rickon says.

Melisandre stops abruptly, rooted to the spot when her eyes meet Shireen’s through the glass door. It feels like a crack of lightning, so much so she thinks she’s heard thunder again. It’s a slick of dread when she saunters towards them, and she and Rickon take a step backwards in unison when she opens the door and steps outside.

“If you’re here for Davos, I’m sorry. It looks like you’ve _just_ missed him,” she says, and Shireen’s heart is the frantic flip because whatever that means it can’t be good, and she’d try to look past Mel to find Davos but she’s too scared to take her eyes off her father’s wife. “But I think you’ll be joining him soon enough. You and your little boyfriend,” she says.

It all happens so fast, so slow at the same time, and it’s nauseating like the quick up and down of a roller coaster when Mel lifts her hand and aims a gun at them. Suddenly she is both aware and completely oblivious to her surroundings. The sound of traffic on the main road just on the other side of Davos’s office is a discombobulating rush, a whooshing noise that fills her ears like the crash of waves. Fat drops of rain fall around them even though the hot flare of a summer sunset is still splashed against her cheek and the red of Mel’s hair. One raindrop hits Shireen on the shoulder and she flinches, half wondering if it’s a bullet come to get her. It’s slowdown drowse even though it’s only been a matter of seconds since Mel stepped outside. Warped and heavy like all three of them are underwater when Rickon takes a single, long legged step in front of Shireen, his arm coming to wrap around her waist and hold her firm against him.

“No, don’t,” she says, because he’s the only unarmed one here.

“Look, lady, why don’t we just calm down,” he says, inching his hands up in the air, palms facing Mel in a classic pose of surrender. “Let’s just chill the fuck out, all right?”

“You calm down,” she says, pulling the trigger once, twice, two hot pops that make Shireen’s ears ring, that make Rickon’s body jerk once, twice when they enter his body.

“ _No_ ,” Shireen screams, flinging her left arm around him to keep the stagger slump of him from falling to the ground, and she holds him to her, holds him to her forever because this cannot be happening, because she _refuses_ to let this happen.

“It’s okay,” he mumbles. “It’s okay, I’ve got you,” he says. “Run, baby. Run.”

“No,” she grits out through the clench of her jaw, because Arya was right, when you’ve got someone on your ass like Mel’s been, it’s better to arm yourself than go into a situation without any defenses. “Stay back, you bitch,” she says, holding Rickon against her as she digs her right hand into her purse, fingers brushing the folded up file papers  as they wrap around the grip of Arya’s personal handgun.

“It’s over, sweetheart, and you know it,” Mel says, a bitter twist in the lipstick on her mouth. “You should have just given up when you had the chance, but you always were a selfish, horrible child,” she says, and she takes a step to the side, trying to get a better angle here where Shireen struggles against Rickon’s ever increasing weight to turn as well. He grunts when a third bullet hits him in the arm, clean through so it bites into Shireen’s left shoulder. Numb. Water floods her mouth like she is going to vomit.

“Fuck you,” Shireen says, thumb finding the safety as she lifts the gun out of her purse. She’s got a sick sort of satisfaction when Mel’s eyes widen in surprise just before the first shot is fired.

Over and over again until her ears ring loud like church bells, until all she can feel is a _click-click-click_ instead of the recoil, and that’s when Shireen flings the empty gun to the pavement. The action is what sends her and Rickon down, finally, her knees buckling under his weight and from the rapid way she’s approaching hyperventilation.

“No, no, _nonono_ ,” she says as she drags him into her lap with his head on her sprawled out thigh, the heaviness of his shoulder pressing her other folded leg hard into the asphalt of the parking lot. “No, don’t you dare,” she says with a cracking sob that shatters her voice into pieces, and the rain that falls on his upturned face could be her tears, she’s crying so hard. _Not you too,_ she thinks, her hand a shaking leaf when she digs in her purse for her phone with one hand while she presses the other over one of those horrible rips in his shirt.

“It’s raining,” he whispers, his baseball shirt stained red, his arm sticky when she grabs him and pulls him closer, and that’s when it registers how it’s just _everywhere,_ red like Mel’s horrible hair, red like the puddle of blood she’s drowning in. _A good clean rain for a good clean start,_ Shireen thinks with a sob, wondering if it will wash this mess away.

“Yeah, honey, it’s raining,” she hiccups, trying to speak soothing things to him, trying not to choke on her breathlessness and panic.

“And the sun’s out,” he says, smiling in a dapple of fading light. “Osha and Wex say hey, you know,” he says, voice petering out, the way a sprinkler dies when the water’s shut off.

“What? Wait, what are you- no, Rickon, please, God no,” she cries when his eyes slide closed. Her shoulder burns where it was shot, as if someone holds a lit candle against her skin, but it is nothing compared to the pain when she can’t see the not-blue-not-green of his eyes anymore.

“They love you, honey. But not as much as I do,” he says with a great heaving sigh, one final hurrah before he stills in her arms.

“ _No. No,_ Rickon, no. Please don’t leave me,” she says, hunching over him, her hair blocking out that last flare of sunset before the day slips out to let twilight in. “You’re my- we- you’re my wall, Rickon, you can’t leave me,” she says.

 _This is all my fault. This is all my fault. I am a selfish, horrible child. I am a selfish, horrible child,_ she thinks as she dials 911, holding him in her arms as if he is something she can put back together. _Please don’t take him,_ she says, thinking of Osha, thinking of Wex. _Please send him back to me, he’s mine._

“He’s mine,” she sobs when the line picks up and a woman’s tinny, radio static voice asks her of the emergency. “He’s mine and I’m his.”

 

There is the hospital parking lot to cross and the panicked place at the front desk where frantic questions are asked and no answers are given. Long hallways and fluorescent lighting that leeches out the color of people’s faces and leaves only grief and worry. Heart pounding elevator rides. Then there’s the ICU and the ER and the choice of which to loiter closest to, but what Gendry fears most is hearing DOA. So he is a head bowed pace up and down one of those goddamn hallways, arms folded across his chest as he keeps his phone clenched in one hand and his fingers in a fist on the other.

After what feels like days but is actually hours he sees Arya at the long end of the hallway, and though his legs are stiff from so much pacing, so much standing and the inability to just sit and wait, Gendry runs to her.

She is wide eyed and stricken, nothing at all like when they got back from the marina in Mexico, and he blames that for the cowardly way his voice breaks like a teenager’s when he speaks.

“Tell me,” he says, and when she does Gendry closes his eyes.

He’s two floors and a wing away from her but the walk goes by in the blink of an eye. _It’s always like that, though,_ he thinks when he pauses outside her door, staring at the white sterility of the floor. _It takes forever to get to the good stuff,_ he thinks, and he can see Rickon and Shireen laughing and drunk in the ocean, arms around each other, a sweet come together that took his cousin her whole life. _But the bad stuff comes at you in a hearbeat,_ he thinks with a sigh, swallowing the lump in his throat before he knocks on her door.

“Tell me,” Shireen says immediately, and they both watch the nurse that’s checking her bandage until she leaves the room. “Tell me,” she repeats firmly..

It’s been a bad night for him but it pales in comparison to hers, sequestered as she’s been during the short surgery to remove the bullet, during the longer battery of questions the police had for her. She’s been through hell and she looks it, the flowers on her black dress stained a brownish rust red, the shadows under her eyes dark like ghosts during a haunting. She is all alone in her room, the pale blue curtains drawn around her bed even though no one else is in the bed next to hers.

“Are you all right? Are the cops giving you any grief?” he asks, trying to dip his toes in first before he has the heavy burden of unloading his heart.

“Self-defense, cut and dry,” she says with an impatient shake of her head, wincing as though she suffers a migraine, but he supposes that’s nothing compared to everything else. “Tell me, Gen. Tell me now. They- they wouldn’t let me see anybody once we got here so they could question me. And now _nobody_ will tell me anything because I’m nobody’s family. So tell me, is he- is he okay? He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?”

“Hey, now, I’m family, all right?” Gendry murmurs, stepping to the edge of her bed to pull her into a careful hug. “Come here, Shir,” he says, but she goes rigid the second he gets his arm around her.

“No, you fucking- you tell me _now,_ Gendry, don’t pull this _Give me a hug_ , this _I hope you’re sitting down_ shit, because that just means the worst thing has happened, and I can’t- don’t make me wait for that, okay? So just fucking _tell_ me,” she says, snaps like a breaking thread, temper and voice strained and brittle.

“He’s dead, Shireen. I’m so sorry, but he didn’t make it. He died before the ambulance got here,” Gendry whispers, tears springing to his eyes even though he was never as close to him as she is.

 _Not is,_ he thinks when she bursts into tears and collapses against him, when she sobs so loud the nurse and a police officer come running into the room, when her agony and despair are so overwhelming she is administered a sedative through her IV drip. Even when she’s eventually calmed down and dozing, her head a side to side loll as she fights the drug, the tears don’t stop.

_Was._


	20. Chapter 20

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [p-p-picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/131260906368/deborahbrucie-jillypups-a-world-alone)

Seven Months Later

 

She’s got earbuds in as she shops in Target with a bright red basket hanging from the crook of her bent arm, passersby’s familiar stares at her face fading to nothing as she hums along to a Little Dragon song. She’s already snagged a few magazines and some hand sanitizer, travel sized everything because she can’t resist cute little packaging. But she still has time to kill, considering how relatively early it is, and so Shireen wanders down the length of the store.

“Why the hell not,” she murmurs when she pauses by the pet aisle, and she’s a faint smile when she grabs a squeaky toy off its hook and tosses it in her basket.

  _I’ve only been a pet owner for less than a year, it’s perfectly normal to want to spoil him._ Spoil him she does; he’s gotten a toy nearly every week since the day where he finally felt like he was hers, and she thinks Shadow could almost be a better name for him, the way he slinks around the house at her heels.

It’s a sudden candy craving that sends her down that particular aisle, and in go a tin of pirouette cookies and a bag of mini M&Ms. And then she’s smiling again, running her fingers down the shiny packaging of a three pack of Orbit spearmint gum, and she can almost see the laughing look on his face the first time he took a piece of gum from her with his teeth. She’s lost in the memory when someone says her name from the end of the aisle, loud enough to pierce through the music pumping into her ears.

“It _is_ you,” Wylla says once Shireen looks up and over, likely because she’s got her hair piled up on top of her head, as warm a March as it’s been, and her scars are on full display. _Better than a calling card,_ Shireen thinks wryly as she turns towards green hair and mascara, towards ripped up jeans and a black bra under a white t-shirt.

“Here I am,” she says as she pulls out an earbud and pauses her music. She’s all prepster clean cut by way of comparison, standing here in a tank top and floral skirt that brushes her toes. Shireen plucks the gum off the shelf and drops it in her basket, takes a deep fortifying breath as she smiles politely to Rickon’s ex-girlfriend, the woman she hasn’t seen since that night at 47 Scott, and it was _not_ Wylla’s finest moment.

“Spearmint was always his favorite,” she says after she’s walked up, their baskets a slight bounce against each other when she looks down at Shireen’s small cache of spur of the moment treasures. “He tasted like it even back in high school,” Wylla says sadly, and Shireen wonders if it’s going to be maudlin histrionics all over again, though sober this time, but then the woman seems to hear herself. “Shit, I’m sorry, that was um, that wasn’t cool. I already owe you an apology too, I think. I don’t remember a whole lot from that night but I remember enough. So, you know, sorry.”

“Thank you,” Shireen says after swallowing the _It’s okay_ that almost came out of her mouth, because if she’s learned anything it’s to cut the bullshit and hang on to what’s real.  The old Shireen might have even apologized for being the woman who got the guy, but that’s something she refuses to be sorry for now. “I appreciate that.”

“You know, I talked to Arya not too long ago. She told me what happened,” Wylla says, gazing down at the white linoleum between their flip flopped feet. She chews her lip and Shireen sighs, waiting for inevitability. “I heard about what happened to your grandfather. I wanted to offer my condolences.”

“He wasn’t my grandfather, but I wish he had been,” Shireen whispers, biting the tremble out of her lower lip, because it’s been months but sometimes it still feels as stinging and as raw as a fresh cut.

She’ll never regret riding in Rickon’s ambulance instead of Davos’s. She was able to see the EMT workers get Rickon stabilized, was there when his lovely eyes opened and focused on hers. She was there when his breath fogged as he wheezed _Hey, Trouble_ inside his clear plastic oxygen mask, was there when she realized their world was still intact. But it still means she never got to say goodbye to Davos; it means he rode alone when an ambulance turned into a hearse, means no one held his hand as he slipped away. Those things still hurt, and it’s hard to wipe it out of her expression even now.

“Jesus, I’m sorry, I didn’t- I just meant sorry is all. Sorry ass Wylla over here,” she says, and Shireen huffs a weak laugh at that.

“Not a problem; you didn’t know. He meant a lot to me. I think about him all the time,” she says, exhaling before she smiles in preparation to say goodbye. “Anyways, I hope you’ve been well, and that- umm,” she says with a frown, because Wylla’s eyes drop to Shireen’s cleavage in an unadulterated, smudged eyeliner stare. She looks down in confusion until the other woman reaches out and snags the chain around her neck with the curl of a finger, pulling the tags out from beneath her shirt.

“No shit,” she breathes, turning a tag over to read his name. A lot of emotions chase themselves across her face, trip up in the crease between her eyebrows and the downturn of her cupid’s bow mouth. Wylla sucks in a breath through her teeth, exhales in a sad chuckle. “I wanted these so badly when he came back, I was certain he’d give them to me. He never did, and the one time I asked- well,” she says. Shireen is about to take a step back to drag the chain out of her grasp, it’s gotten that sad and that weird, but then Wylla seems to gather herself. She drops them of her own accord and looks up with a watery sort of smile.

“How’s he doing, anyways? Arya said it was pretty bad. I wanted to um, I wanted to go visit him but she said he refused to see anyone but you ‘til he got out of the hospital,” she says, gesturing to the tags. “Another sign you’re the one for him, huh,” and Shireen wants to say _Yes, yes it is._

“He’s doing well. Really, really well, actually.”

Shireen tucks the tags back under her shirt against her heart where they belong. _Very well,_ she thinks, and she smiles because he made love to her twice yesterday, once in the afternoon and once sometime in the middle of the night. It was the rowdiest and most energetic he’s been since what happened last August. “He’s, yeah. He’s great.”

“Clearly,” Wylla says dryly, and Shireen flushes when she realizes the sex-smug look that must be slathered on her face like sunscreen. “Well,” she says with an inhale and sigh, “glad to hear it. And um, thank you for taking care of him.”

“There’s nothing I would have rather done,” Shireen says before she puts the earbud back in and turns her music back on, turns on her heel and heads back for the checkout with a serene sort of smile on her face.

And it’s true. She slept in a chair in his room the entire two weeks he was in the hospital, and she’s slept in his bed ever since he came home. She cut his food when his arm was still in his sling and walked Shaggy so often he started curling up with her instead of him. There was simply no other place for her, no wild horse alive that could have dragged her away.

“Trubs is back,” Jojen cries with gusto the second she walk in through the door.

“Where the hell have you been, it’s been _days_ since you left,” Bran says.

“Is he still asleep?” she asks, kicking off her flip flops by the door and tossing her keys in the bowl next to everyone else’s.

“Out like a light. Shaggy stole your spot though, like the second he heard the car start,” Jojen says. “Though Ric’s not spooning up quite the same way he does with you, at least not when I walked back there an hour ago,” he says, and Shireen smiles, because it’s like trying to escape a boa constrictor sometimes, he holds onto her so tight every morning. _Tighter, now that his shoulder’s healed,_ she thinks.

“You guys’ll never guess who I ran into at Target,” she says.

“No clue. Just please tell me you hit up a Taco Bell on your way home,” Jojen says from his sprawl on the couch, his head in Bran’s lap while the latter man combs his hair with his fingers.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Enjoy your gut bombs,” Shireen says, tossing the paper bag full of chalupas onto the coffee table, and a glance at the television tells her they’ve been here binge watching _Keeping Up Appearances_ since she left two hours ago, because clearly some things never change.

“What are we going to do without her, B? These two losers are going to go travel the world and leave us all alone,” Jojen says with a melodramatic sigh that is undermined by his snort of laughter when he looks back at the TV screen.

“You’re going to be making a lot of fast food runs, that’s what. I’m not exactly fit for running, in case you forgot,” Bran says, and Jojen laughs and tells him there are such thing has fast food _rolls_.

It’s been seven months of this sort of banter since she moved in, the kind of light ribbing between them that pulled Rickon out of his trauma and hand-held her throughout her mourning. Shireen smiles with a roll of her eyes as she plunks her Target bags on the counter beside their Taco Bell, because as much as she and Rickon are jonesing for some time alone, she will miss her other roommates.

 “So I ran into Wylla,” she says, digging the squeaky toy out of the bag, giving it a squeeze after she yanks off the tag. The sound of dog nails and the jingling of a collar sounds from down the hall, and she thinks if that won’t wake him up then she will. He sleeps like a log these days, playing catchup for a year of nightmares that don’t really plague him much, anymore.  He was in bed when she left, and there is a deep protective part of her that is glad he’s still there. _I could sleep a hundred years,_ he said once. He’s well on his way.

“Oh yeah? That must have been as fun as pulling teeth. I hope you waltzed right by and shook your tail feather in her face,” Bran says with a laugh, taking the bag after Jojen reaches over and grabs it. “Go on, show us what it looked like.”

“Something a little like this,” Shireen says, tossing the toy to Shaggy before she turns on her heel to mince out of the room like she’s some sort of cabaret girl even though not an inch of skin is showing below her chest.

“Uh oh,” Bran says over the rustle and wrinkle of paper bag and wax paper, the repeated squeaks of a rubber dog toy, the tinny sounds of a laugh track.

“Don’t you do it, you bastard,” Jojen says, his mouth already full.

“Too late, Jo, Trubs turned me,” Bran sighs.

“Goddammit, Shireen, you owe me a boyfriend,” Jojen yells.

Shireen bites back a laugh as she heads down the hall towards their bedroom, land of wood blinds and slatted sunlight, world of spaghetti strap dresses hanging next to old fatigues, books on the nightstand and roaming hands that never stop. She’s a tiptoe slide when she slips into their room, worn out old area rug silencing her footfalls, muted light setting the muscles of his back aglow where he’s sprawled in bed, and her heart beats to see him, just like it did when she first fell in love with him.

 

He knows she’s back the second the bed bounces from Shaggydog jumping off the foot of it but he waits with his eyes closed, with his body still drenched from the ebbing tide of sleep, because it’s too good, finally being comfortable enough to sleep on his stomach. That’s where she finds him, and he grins before he even has his eyes open because of the way her fingers drag down the course of his spine. Rickon hums, stretching his folded arms out from under his pillow, one hand sliding across the mattress where he knows she’s kneeling on the edge. Sure enough there’s a giggle in the back of her throat once he wedges his fingers in the bend of her knee, and he gives her a tug.

“How’d you sleep?” she says once she’s sitting down with her back to the headboard, the bed a familiar dip with her beside him, here where she belongs. Woman to his wolf, sweet to his sinew. “Have any bad dreams?” Maternal to his muster.

“Some. But there were good ones too,” he says, because it’s the truth and the bad ones aren’t even all that bad anymore. He doesn’t need Shaggy there these days, though the big lug still sprawls out on their bed, sometimes between them though never for long.

 “You’re starting to look like your dog, you know,” she says as if she reads his mind, and she reaches over to run her fingers through the overgrown tousle of his hair. He’d think she wants him to cut it if she wasn’t constantly playing with it, and he grins as her fingers close in a ginger-light fist.

“Arrroooo,” he says though he’d rather purr at the touch, lifts his head and gets up on his elbows to haul himself over and bury his face in her lap. She’s mid-shriek when he grunts in pain and immediately eases off his right arm, settling instead to rest his head on her thigh and look up at her. “Woof,” he grins.

“Your chest wounds again?” she asks, lightly enough considering it bothers him nearly every day, and Rickon nods, turning his face into the touch she’s running through his scruff.

“It was just a weird angle, that’s all.”

“And you’re sure you’re well enough for this, Hooligan? It’s a _long_ drive. I seem to remember promising you first class tickets.”

“Ehh,” he says with a lopsided shrug, lifting a hand to tug loose the knot of her hair on top of her head, and Rickon smiles when it comes tumbling down like Jack down his hill. “Shaggydog won’t like being caged up in the belly of some plane. It’ll be a fun drive.”

“I know, but you just said- _ohmigod_ ,” she gasps when he flexes his abs taut and sits up, 12 hours of sleep his fuel as he hauls her away from the headboard and flips her down, shoulder blades to the mattress, her hair a black fan against a white tangle of sheets.

“You want me to prove it, honey? Huh?” he says, careful of his shoulder as he lowers himself down to kiss her throat. “I mean, I thought I did a pretty good job of it last night, but if you still don’t think I’m strong enough to sit shotgun in your dumb little car, then I have my work cut out for me.”

He does, a little bit, since being on top is still a little difficult, but she either doesn’t realize it or else she plays along, all closed eyes and parted mouth smiles, whimpers and stretches and sighs once they do the dance to get themselves naked. The occasional wince of pain is drowned out by the way she says his name and how he’s soon breathless, here with his hips locked in the cradle of hers, here where he’s home and safe and sound.

Here where he’s _happy_.

“So you’re happy, then?” EB asks once Rickon’s last group therapy session is over.

The others scrape their chairs back and stand, as the circle of veterans is now just a circle of metal chairs, EB, Rickon and Sandor, and he takes a last lingering look around the classroom. He used to be haunted by the happy playground echoes here; now he sees something that feels a lot like hope, here. Anticipation, even. Falling asleep is not a countdown to terror, anymore.

“Yeah, I am. I’m real happy, actually. If you can believe it,” he says, reaching down to pet Shaggy where he’s lying at Rickon’s feet with his head between his paws, the black nylon leash draped over his knees.

“Oh, you definitely look it, Ric, that’s for sure. She must be amazing,” EB says with a wink, and here Rickon laughs, because his hands still smell like her, because sometimes he uses her lotion just to carry her around with him all day. “The thing is, you sure you’re not running away, on this road trip?”

_So you really meant what you asked me? You really want to?_

_Of course I want to, Shir. Did_ you _mean it when you said yes?_

_Oh my god, yes._

“No, we’re not running away,” he says with a smile as he watches Shaggy roll onto his back, asking for belly scratches, the most undignified pose for a big bad wolf-dog like he’s supposed to be. “We’re running _towards_ something, that’s all,” he says, echoing Shireen’s own excited words from a few days ago.

“Well, whatever it is, enjoy yourself. You both deserve it, from what you’ve told me,” EB says as he claps Rickon lightly on the back. “You take care, son. You’ve come a far way, and I’m proud of you.

“Thank you, sir,” Rickon says, and he whistles for Shaggy to stand when he’s on his own two feet, follows Sandor out of the room after flicking off the light.

“What _did_ you tell him?” Sandor asks as they walk out to the parking lot where Shireen will pick him up. The big guy’s as fidgety as Shireen gets when she’s excited or antsy about something, and he’s size 14 foot taps and checking his phone for the time, hands in the pockets of his jeans and then right back out again.

“I didn’t tell him about Mexico, if that’s what you’re thinking, though I did tell him I blacked out during a fist fight,” Rickon says, kicking a stray rock with the toe of his Converse. “Just what happened with Mel and Davos, that’s all. Christ knows that’s enough of a fucking tale, huh?”

“No shit,” Sandor says, squinting up through the spray of afternoon sun when Shireen’s Saab pulls into the driveway, suitcases still bungeed to the roof rack where Rickon secured them an hour ago. “So, I guess I don’t know when we’ll see you again, do I?” he says.

Rickon grins when he looks up at Sandor, and he does a quick memorization of him, salt-and-pepper beard and a cheek full of scars, grey eyes that have warmed up considerably. He shrugs one shoulder. “We’ll be back for the wedding, so long as you ask my sister, already,” he says, and now they’re both grinning to each other as he walks backwards towards his ride, his woman, his future.

“I’m asking her right now, just as soon as your sorry ass gets in the car and leaves,  you prick,” Sandor says with a gruff-huff chuckle.

“Well then stop putting your hands in your fucking pockets, you’re gonna drop the ring,” Rickon shouts before he opens the backseat and lets the dog in.

“Is he ready, you think?” Shireen asks once he’s buckled himself into the front seat, and he looks at her, because _Ready, set, go._

She’s got her hair in two braids with some sort of scarf tied in it, her cat’s eye sunglasses on and a smear of red lip gloss, and she looks like some sort of fifties pinup when she beams a hundred watt smile at him. Rickon laughs suddenly, because even though they’re cramped in a little car full of luggage and dogs and ghosts, bottles of water and snacks and a dash full of magazines, he feels free. He feels light.

“Oh, he’s ready. Question is, Trouble, are _you_?”

 

It’s only been two weeks but she’s gotten used to it now, the sea salt in her hair and the sun freckling her skin no matter how much sunscreen she uses, because despite coming from the desert Shireen has never spent so much time outdoors. They are either at the beach or on fishing boats every day, drinking beers on patios downtown or buying fish in open air markets, learning to surf or in Shireen’s case, snorkeling to say hi to all the pretty, pretty fish. And then that one time at Rickon’s rotten boy insistence, screwing like a couple of teenagers on a Sunday morning sandbar.

She hasn’t been to Key West since she was eight, completely forgot how the white and blue and green of it seem to stretch out and seep into everything. The buildings and houses downtown all look like they’re sandcastles sprayed with citrus, gingerbread miracles with porches made of spun sugar. Everyone smiles, music pumps from everywhere and more than once has she gone the entire day wearing her suit, even grocery shopping. She’s wearing one now with a sarong, sitting at a low table in the noisy, crowded Sloppy Joe’s bar with her feet in Rickon’s lap and a half empty margarita in her hand. His arms are tan, tan, tan where they drape over her shins, as berry brown as his bare chest is, though the bullet wounds are still visible, but then, the one on her shoulder is too. Part of her hates them, and part of her doesn’t even care.

“That’s honestly so sweet, y’all coming all the way down here for your grandpa,” Dany says, her white blonde hair rivaling the sand from its ponytail on top of her head. She’s swirling her umbrella in the froth of her pina colada before licking the soggy wooden point of it. They met these two a week ago and have hung out with them nearly every day as they show them the sites. They are wild and unfettered, and it’s unlocked something inside her, this idea of being absolutely free. Unhaunted. At peace.

“Did he live here or something?” her husband asks, and if Shireen thinks Rickon’s tan now she need only to glance Drogo’s way to realize how far he’s got to go.

“No,” Shireen says when Rickon looks her way, sweet as coconut and pineapple, tender as the arches of her feet after running barefoot on the beach. She smiles and shakes her head, thinks of the small urn initialed D.S. on a shelf in their condo. “But we decided to buy some property down here, and I know he’d want to be wherever we are. Plus he worked so hard every day of his life. I like the idea of Davos being on vacation for forever, you know?” she says.

“Believe me, I get it,” Dany says with a grin as she gives her husband a hungry-honey gaze. “We came here for our honeymoon five years ago and haven’t quite found a reason to leave. Drogo could probably find you work down on the docks where he’s got a little fishing tour business, Rickon,” she says.

“Well, I’d love the job experiences, but we’re not going to be staying here permanently, I don’t think,” he says before swigging his beer, rolling the condensation drenched bottle against Shireen’s calf to make her jump.

“Yeah, just as long as it takes,” Shireen says, giving his ribs a nudge with the heel of her foot. He grins like a school boy when he slides a mint-blue gaze her way, and Drogo has to ask her twice before she can pay attention.

“As long as what takes?” Drogo asks.

“To learn how to sail,” she says, grinning at Rickon. He’s wild these days, hair wild and tangled with ocean spray, tied back as it is now whenever the wind pulls it in his eyes too much. He’s wild and undone, loose limbed and more prone to smiles than he’s been since the day they met, a happy-fated collision into each other in his parents’ house.

“Really! You guys bought a boat then, not a house?” Dany asks, pretty face brightening at the idea. She and Drogo have only been talking sailboats for the past hour, all while Rickon and she soaked up every last bit of information.

“Yeah,” he says, polishing off his beer. “I asked her if she wanted to sail the open seas with Shaggy and me and she said yes. You guys want to come check it out, tell me if we bought a lemon?”

“Yeah, let me just pound this drink,” Dany says, grinning as the four of them get to their feet.

“What’s she called? Did you name her yet?” Drogo asks, reaching for the slice of pineapple hanging off the rim of his wife’s glass, and he drops it in his mouth with a chuckle when she swats him for the theft.

“That was the first thing we did,” Shireen says, bringing her arm around the low of Rickon’s back when he drapes his across her shoulders. She’s home here, with her bare feet and an unfurnished condo, with a spanking new sloop and a city whose zip code she doesn’t even know. “It’s called _The Seaworth._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I HOPE I HAVE REDEEMED MYSELF, THAT IS ALL. 
> 
> One more chapter to come, like 500 words or so. XOXOXOXO and thank you all for waiting for this chapter. Now go brush your teeth or you're gonna get cavities.


	21. Chapter 21

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/131605354173/a-world-alone-chapter-22-epilogue)

Five years later

There is not much noise here save for the lazy lap of water amongst the mangrove roots across where Rickon sits, his bare feet wet from where they dangle off the short, stubby dock. _The Seaworth_ bobs just so at the end of her tether, hovering beside him like Shaggydog does whenever they grill steak. She lets her presence be known with the occasional list and creak, though those have died down since that kayak disappeared around the bend twenty minutes ago. And there’s always the sound of the occasional gull, ever present, giving him a swoop of inspection before it realizes he isn’t sneaking junk food down here but a cigarette. He flicks ash in the empty old Coke can he’s holding, gazes down between his cocked out knees down into the moss-green murk of the canal beneath him.

Three weeks ago they were swimming out here, and he laughed so hard he nearly choked on seawater when Shireen screamed at the top of her lungs after a manatee brushed her calf. They’ve only seen a few in the year they’ve called Cudjoe Key their home, and Rickon wouldn’t mind seeing one now, all docile cloud floating underwater, mermaid meets seal, but he’s got nothing but his wavering warble of a reflection to look at. _I need a haircut,_ he thinks, callback to that distant soldier who occasionally crops up in his thoughts, but he grins to nobody, or to himself. Because he knows he won’t cut it, not unless Shireen suddenly stops running her hands through it with a purr in the back of her throat, though if the stuff grows past his eyes he might consider a trim.

“I thought I’d find you out here,” she says from behind him, faraway, footfalls in grass, not yet to the dock.

It’s the voice of his dreams, sound of rain on the window, of sheets against skin. As soothing as it is, still it makes him jump nearly out of his skin, and Rickon sucks in another drag before fumbling with the can to try and shove the cigarette down inside it. He smokes maybe once every couple of months, and quite frankly he thought he was better at sneaking than this. But now it’s laughter he hears.

“I thought I was being sly,” he says over his shoulder, squinting in the lemongrass haze of a sunset squeezed through so many palm trees. 

She’s dreamworld sway, head bowed as she drags the baby fine hairs off her neck and tries to sweep them up towards a high ponytail. Crickets and a scatter of tiny frogs leap away from the hem of her dress as she crosses the yard that he’d mow if it weren’t so full of life all the damned time. All manners of life _there_ too, snared in a sundress so loose he hopes he might catch a glimpse of something, captured in the swing of her hips and the eyeroll grin she gives him when their eyes meet.

“You’re not hiding anything, Hooligan. I could smell you from the house,” she says. “I’ve got a nose like a hound dog, remember?” and her voice curves like a seashell from the easy smile she’s got when she plops down beside him on the dock.

“I lit the grill, though,” he says in defense, glancing once more behind him towards their house and the narrow stretch of sandy driveway.

“Don’t worry, they’re not back yet. We have a few minutes,” she says, nudging his shoulder with hers, one sailboat tattoo to the other. “No, no, I don’t want my hands to smell. They’ll find me out,” she says when he tries handing her the half smoked cigarette.

“Oh, and not me? You’ll just throw me under the bus, huh,” he says, holding his fingers up like a boy scout salute with the cigarette between them.

“Everybody already knows with _you,_ ” she grins, tilting her body into his, and Rickon leans back with a hand braced to the dock behind him, watching and smiling as Shireen’s eyes close when she kisses the cigarette and inhales.

Despite her earlier reassurance, Shireen still glances behind her before exhaling a hot plume of smoke out over the canal water. He stuffs the last of the cigarette into the sharp edged mouth of his can, shakes it to and fro to make sure the last drops of flat soda drown out the ember before setting it down.

“God, that was good,” she sighs, dragging the hem of her dress up past her knees as she finally swings her legs out over the dock’s edge, to dip down into the water beside Rickon’s. “Like, _naughty_ good.”

“Nothin’ wrong with _naughty_ good, Trouble, so long as you make it quick. Christ knows I can, if a situation calls for it,” he grins once he leans back to lie supine and squint up at a pastel sky, the kind kids paint and no one thinks are real. Rickon reaches out blind where he knows she is, curling his fingers around the bunched up skirt of her dress to yank it further up, and they both laugh when he says _I’m halfway there now, just like you like it._

“As exhausted as they’ve been each day, I don’t know if even _you_ can be that quick, no matter how much practice you’ve had lately,” she says, and it’s all happy, familiar Shireen-sigh when she hums and lies back beside him, head tilted towards his.

“I could still _try,_ ” he says without meaning it, because right now kissing her temple is about all he’d like, because kissing her temple and feeling her mouth on his cheek when he looks back up at the sky is just about perfect.

That, and entertaining houseguests after four years on the lam isn’t easy, and he knows she’s as worn out as he is. His family has been here a week already, visiting him in the first home he’s called his own and actually meant it, here in the thicket and wild and water, here with butterfly and minnow and alligator and snake. Here with his love, here with his peace. Here where it’s quiet, and right now, almost _too_ quiet.

“I can’t believe I don’t hear anything,” Shireen murmurs, and their turn towards each other with relieved smiles, her hair a snare of black on the wood grains of the dock just as the unruly mess of his own tugs against his scalp.

“Perfectly quiet,” he whispers, lifting his hand so he can run fingertips down that familiar terrain of her cheek, a touch that only makes her smile these days. _These years._  “I love you,” he says, because it’s like licking a candy apple every time he says it, it’s like sinking his teeth in one whenever she says it back.

“I love you, too,” Shireen says. She’s eyes the color of every sea they’ve sailed, the blink of a sunrise, the mouth of a lover, mouth of a-

“Hey, guys, we’re back,” Sansa says between the huff and puff of lugging a day’s worth of beach accessories, the strain of nonstop vacation, the tired happiness of a long overdue honeymoon.

Rickon and Shireen are two jackknives side by side as they sit up, pulling their legs out of the water in unison, and he is first to his wet feet, holds out a hand so his wife has a place for hers when she stands up beside him. He gives a shifty-eyed glance to the soda can hidden in the overgrown grass before he looks up and smiles at his sister and brother in law.

“Hey, y’all,” he says, smooth as he can be.

“Oh, yeah, ‘y’all,’ _that’s_ natural,” Shireen huffs beside him before kissing his shoulder and walking towards her sister in law, and as always he’s a happy man in pursuit of such a sight.

“It’s called _acclimating_ , okay?” Rickon grins, his words making both Sansa and Shireen laugh as they shake the sand out of beach towels, as Shireen plucks one, two, three sand pails out of Sansa’s shoulder bag before dropping them to the lawn. Rickon watches two crabs scuttle out, and a quick head shake from Sandor, bringing up the rear with precious cargo, convinces him to keep mum.

“Was she okay? She didn’t wear you out, did she?” Shireen asks as she takes the bag and shoulders it herself, linking her arm with Sansa’s as she pulls her towards the house.

“Oh my goodness, are you kidding me? She was _amazing_. She’s gonna get _him_ acclimated, if you know what I mean,” Sansa says, and Rickon just catches the look his big sister shares with the guy he met in group all those haunted years ago.

“Jesus,” Sandor mutters, his complexion managing the impossible the way he’s blanching beneath a sunburn.

“Don’t worry, man, I uh, I lit the grill, so we have a few minutes to hang here if you want,” Rickon says, grinning at the sight of Sandor with a passenger, the sight of a man badly in need of a beer, maybe, a sunset swim with a manatee, maybe, but then, Rickon sees it. Rickon grins.

 _Everyone’s scared when they hear that news,_ he wants to say, but that sort of conversation takes time. Takes privacy. Takes quiet.

Sandor is an imposing _hulk_ of a man who rivals Drogo, even in just a white t-shirt and swim trunks, but with a kid on his shoulders he’s even bigger. As awkward as it might be for an uncle who’s only met his niece once, after a week of sandbar trips and sails around the keys, after a week of _Read me Read me Read me Read me,_ it seems the grizzled old SOB has softened to their daughter’s affections. Because he’s got a little bit of reluctance in his big arms once he plucks the little girl off his shoulders and sets her down amongst the green and the frogs, and she’s as green and springy as they are, though that much more precious to Rickon.

“Dada!” she squeals, a stubby legged gambol that makes Rickon drop to his knees as he spreads out his arms, the earth a soft sinking sponge beneath him once she launches herself against his chest.

“That’s me, honey,” he says, squeezing his eyes tight as he holds on to the world.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU GUYS SO MUCH for reading and sticking through to the end, even through that Really Shitty Chapter, haha. ❤️❤️❤️ I hope it was a satisfying read, too (fingers crossed!)
> 
> But seriously y'all are always so kind and supportive and I have nothing but love for you!! Thanks again, sincerely.


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